Karin Konoval is best known for a face nobody has seen: the orangutan Maurice, whom she played under motion-capture across three Planet of the Apes films. It is patient, physical work, built from watching real animals, and the films are better for it.
Fi1m perspective
In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), in a fort of lashed timber among the redwoods, an orangutan sits with a class of young apes and teaches them to read. That is Maurice, and under the fur is Karin Konoval, a stage actor in her fifties playing an elderly male ape. Weta Digital put the rain on the fur and the breath in the cold air. The slowness is hers: the long reach, the low weight, the head that turns a beat before the body does.
She came to it by an unlikely road. Konoval trained as a dancer until she was sixteen, took a degree in English and theatre history at the University of Alberta, then went to theatre school in Vancouver in 1981 and spent the following decades on stage, in plays and musicals. Screen work began in 1986, mostly guest parts in science fiction and horror, among them several visits to The X-Files, most memorably in the episode 'Home' (1996). A lead in Cable Beach (2004) brought wider notice. Then came Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), in which she is credited as Maurice and, briefly, as a court clerk, and the character stayed with her through Dawn (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), with a short return in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024).
The part was built by looking. Konoval studied real orangutans before shooting, one in particular, and she has said that he spent twenty minutes studying her face in return, and that somewhere in those twenty minutes he gave her Maurice. In Rise Maurice is more presence than character, and our review did not single her out, which was fair. Dawn gives him a job and a classroom, and it is in that first hour, when the apes sign more than they speak, that the performance earns its keep. We had not expected a film of that size to trust us with fifteen minutes of sign language, and Maurice's schoolroom is part of why the trust holds. Andy Serkis and Toby Kebbell take the honours in Dawn, and they should. Konoval's work is the kind that makes theirs legible: a steady figure for Caesar to turn to. Matt Reeves, who directed Dawn and War, and Terry Notary, who worked alongside her in all three, are the collaborators who count.
The reservation is obvious. Nearly everyone who admires Maurice could not pick Konoval out of a line-up, and to anyone not reading the credits the achievement looks like Weta's. Her recurring television work since, in Snowpiercer and The Good Doctor, has not changed that. She was fifty when the part of her career arrived, and it arrived wearing fur. She also writes and paints, which may be the sensible response.
Biography
Karin Konoval is a Canadian-American actress. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, she moved to Canada as a child and grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, where she trained as a dancer. She graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Arts and later moved to Vancouver to pursue acting.
She is known for her performance-capture role as the orangutan Maurice in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), as well as guest and recurring appearances in series including The X-Files, Supernatural, The Good Doctor and Snowpiercer. Konoval has received awards for her theatre work and for lead roles in features such as Cable Beach (2004). She is also a painter and writer.
