Terry Notary is the actor you are not meant to spot: the movement coach who plays Rocket in the Planet of the Apes films and teaches everyone else how to walk. The work is good enough to go unnoticed, and it usually does.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the apes who are not Caesar. In Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) the one called Rocket is Terry Notary, and so, in a sense, are most of the others, because Notary taught the cast how to move before he put on his own motion-capture suit. That is his position in a film: on screen and behind it at the same time, doing a job most viewers never think to look for.
He came to it sideways. A gymnast, then a Cirque du Soleil performer, he went into film as a movement coach on How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and then Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes (2001), where he also doubled stunts. From Avatar (2009) he made motion-capture creatures his trade. The reboot trilogy that began in 2011 and ended with War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) gave him Rocket for three films and the running of what the crews called Ape School, drilling large casts in how a chimpanzee carries its weight. Since then he has been Kong in Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Cull Obsidian in the Avengers films (2018–2019), and he still teaches.
What he teaches is not imitation. His method is to get actors to drop human tension and let the body find something plainer and older; he has said that playing Rocket is "really just me quieting the cerebral side of myself." That may sound like a warm-up exercise, but the result is on screen. In the first hour of Dawn, when the apes sign to each other and speak barely at all, we stopped seeing performers in suits and saw a society with rules, and we were surprised by how completely we believed it. Andy Serkis and Toby Kebbell got the credit in our review, and they earned it, but the apes around them moved like apes because Notary had taught them to.
Which is also the difficulty. We scored Rise 80 and Dawn 78 and did not mention Notary in either, and we were not wrong to leave him out: the job is to make the group credible, not to stand out from it. Much of his career is uncredited or listed as movement coach, and his name will not travel far outside the trade. The one time a director put his own face on screen, as Oleg the performance artist in Ruben Östlund's The Square (2017), he was found through online footage of him imitating apes. We have not reviewed it, so we will say only that it is the film to seek if you want to see what the suit has been hiding.
Notary has worked three times each with Serkis and Peter Jackson and twice with Matt Reeves, which tells you where the big creature work lives. He will go on doing careful work in films that do not list him. The quotes suggest that does not trouble him; he seems to like being the ape nobody can name.
Biography
Terry Notary (born 14 August 1968) is an American actor, stunt performer, coordinator and movement coach. He trained as a gymnast, competed at collegiate level for UCLA and performed with Cirque du Soleil before moving into film work.
Notary began as a movement coach on Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes (2001). He is known for motion-capture performances as Rocket and Bright Eyes in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and its sequels, as well as roles in Avatar (2009), the Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).
