Proximus Caesar Isn’t A Villain, He’s Just Trying to Save Apedom

The Big Picture

• Collider’s Perri Nemiroff chats with
  Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
  stars, Kevin Durand and Owen Teague, and movement coordinator Alain Gauthier.
• While Durand’s Proximus Caesar is the antagonist and Teague’s Noa is the protagonist of the movie, the two do align on one particular thing.
• Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
  is directed by Wes Ball, and hits theaters nationwide on May 10th.

You don’t have to agree with a movie villain’s actions, but understanding why they do them makes for a far more complex and engaging antagonist, and that’s most certainly the case with Kevin Durand’s Proximus Caesar in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

The movie takes place hundreds of years after the death of Caesar (Andy Serkis) in War for the Planet of the Apes. Some are aware of what Caesar fought for, others are not. Some work to uphold his values, while others, like Proximus Caesar, have warped them beyond recognition. He’s the ruler of an ape kingdom who’s determined to claim all human ideas and technology that will assure a quicker ascension for apes and, therefore, keep them firmly in control.

With Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes making its way into theaters nationwide on Friday, May 10th, I got the chance to chat with Proximus Caesar himself, Kevin Durand, Owen Teague who leads the film as Noa, and their movement coordinator, Alain Gauthier. During our session together, I had the pleasure of getting a step-by-step breakdown of how Durand and Teague found their characters physically, but we also took some time to explore their backstories and discuss what landed them in the positions we find them in at the beginning of the film.

How Proximus Caesar Came Into Power

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is packed to the brim with highly intriguing character development and world building. While director Wes Ball does provide enough in this particular story alone, he makes it so easy to get lost in this world that it’s hard not to wonder what stories lie in every untapped corner — or perhaps the details of the main characters’ backstories.

During our chat, I asked Durand and Teague to share some character details they came up with on their own, something that, perhaps, isn’t seen or heard in the film, but the audience can still feel informing their performances. Durand began:

“For Proximus I just imagined him as a young bonobo, and just the fact that he could conceive outside of the present, the future, and it made him very different.
He had all these grand ideas that none of the other bonobos really understood. It kind of took him to a point where he really started thinking deeply about the future of apedom
, and eventually, it evolved into — one of the things that I said to Owen, that actually Proximus said to Noa, we first met as apes and one of the first things I told him was that
if we lose power, we will probably end up living in cages again, and our ancestors will live in those cages
. Humans will sit on the other side of those cages, eating delicious snacks, going, ‘Oh, isn’t that neat? Oh, lookie, he pooped,’ right? And so, by any means necessary, he basically sought to figure out how to keep control of that power.”

Are Proximus’ actions deplorable in the movie? Absolutely. But is his motivation wrong? It’s a little too easy to recognize that these are some very valid concerns he has here. Durand added, “I realize that he’s known as the villain, but it’s all perspective of narrative. I just thought he was trying to save apedom.”

Not only is this take on Proximus something Teague sees himself, but he also thinks Noa and Proximus somewhat see eye to eye on the matter, too. “That’s the cool thing about Noa and Proximus is that they don’t actually disagree about that. Ideologically, there’s some similarity because once you tell me the importance of this, Noa starts kind of wondering about that.”

What keeps Noa from fully aligning with Proximus’ mission to subjugate humankind at all costs? As Teague put it, it’s his clan, Eagle Clan.

What Is Eagle Clan?

Teague’s character, Noa, is a young ape who knows nothing about the world beyond his village. That means, for Teague, all backstory work was rooted in Eagle Clan and how it’s shaped the ape Noa is today.

“In terms of Noa’s backstory, there was a lot of work that we did in ape school just among ourselves as the apes, developing a culture for Eagle Clan, for the village that Noa comes from — laws of that society, legends. Our day-to-day existence in Eagle Clan was really important. But specifically speaking for Noa, one thing that I came up with to kind of form this relationship between him and his mom — it’s only a couple of scenes, but you get a real sense that there’s a real closeness there, unlike him and his father.”

How did Teague go about conveying that unspoken closeness between Noa and his mother? He did it by developing a history for a piece of production design in the movie.

“There’s a difficulty communicating between Noa and his father, but with his mom, you see these fish racks, essentially, because in the Eagle Clan, the eagles hunt the fish and we dry them and smoke them, and there are these racks that come out like clothes-drying racks where the fish hang, and my one thing that I thought about maybe Noa doing as a kid with his mom was helping her design those and helping her build those, and this kind of connection where
she understood him in a way that dad didn’t, and it was through this kind of engineering thing that he’s got going on
.”

Looking for more from Teague and Durand on the making of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes? You can find just that in my full chat with the duo and Gauthier in the video at the top of this article. Even better? The video also includes five minutes of my attempt to move like an ape under Gauthier’s direction.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes arrives in theaters in the U.S. on May 10th. Click below for showtimes.

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