Flushed Away

[DB7]

Flushed Away's Jackman and Serkis
Source: Heather Newgen
October 27, 2006



In DreamWorks Animation and Aardman's new computer-animated comedy Flushed Away, Hugh Jackman is trading in his Wolverine claws for a shiny black pressed tux to play Roddy, a pampered pet mouse who thinks he's living quite the life until an unexpected house guest, a sewer rat named Sid (Shane Richie), busts in on his luxurious pad and stirs up trouble. Roddy comes up with a scheming plan to get rid of Sid, but it goes awry and he finds himself swirling down the pipes into the underworld of London's sewers, where he finds more difficulties.

"At the beginning, he was more upper class, almost royal -- that aristocratic attitude. He had two hamsters who were his servants," Jackman told ComingSoon.net. "So, the whole thing, going down into the sewer, was more, 'Oh, you people.' It was a little bit removed and snobbish, which actually made him not very likable. And so, we changed it from being that to being more sheltered, basically. He lives in this pampered life. He doesn't think of himself as a mouse, he thinks of himself as a James Bond character. He's having the time of his life. And, he sings occasionally."

Roddy does sing in the film, but it's really the sewer slugs' performance that stands out and Jackman doesn't seem to mind. "The slugs were so fantastic, I thought they were brilliant. They do, they steal the show, I agree. Oscar loves the slugs. That's my son. He thought the slugs were his favorite thing."

Once Roddy is down in the sewers, he meets Rita (Kate Winslet), a street-wise rat who can help him get home. But, before that can happen, they have to escape from the wicked Toad (Ian McKellen) and his two luckless sidekicks Whitey (Bill Nighy) and the very bossy Spike (Andy Serkis) who despise all other rodents.


"Spike thinks he's bigger than his boots. He's this narley little kind of over-energized kind of neurotic rat who works for The Toad. He basically wants to run a gang, but he's just not capable of it and mostly just gets hurt…He thinks he has these great plans, but they always backfire and he always gets injured," Serkis laughed. "Whitey is kind of more like the philosopher of the two. He is he intellectually superior where Spike just does things without thinking. Whitey gives it a little bit of thought."

Although Serkis got to work with Nighy on many of their scenes together, which is rare in animation, Jackman didn't have the same opportunity to work with Winslet, who voices the character in the film he interacts with the most.

"The thing is, to be honest, Kate is one of the best actors going around, so she can make anything work and I think we did- - what happened was once she started to record more and I was recording, I would listen to her a lot. Sometimes they would even play her to me so I can hear her," Jackman explained. "And I also had a fantastic woman called Susan who would read opposite me. She was at every session I believe in New York or here. She was great. She would read every part. She was incredible. She'd go from Toad to Rita to Sid and Whitey, all of them. Le Frog, she did all of them. So I always had someone to work with but Kate was just phenomenal, isn't she?"

Serkis and Jackman had different reasons for doing an animated film.

"I read the script and I just thought it was great," Serkis said. "It's a really excellent caper and just fun characters. This posh rat who thinks he has everything, but actually doesn't have anything because he's a very isolated quite lonely character and he meets Rita and ignites this sort of friendship that turns into by the end something else. I like the story. I think it's cool."

Jackman, on the other hand, said when he "was in drama school in 1994, I turned on SBS -- which is a television station in Australia, and not a highly watched one -- and I saw the last seven minutes of [Aardman's] 'The Wrong Trousers,' and my brother and I were laughing so hard that we thought, 'We've got to find this.' So, we tracked it down and got a video. We used to give it as presents. It was our standard present to anyone. I thought we'd discovered them. I think they'd won an Academy Award at that point, but when I was in Perth, I thought we'd somehow discovered them. So, when I got a call from that group, I was totally in. I think it's fair to say it was selfish reasons first, and then I thought of my son afterwards."

Flushed Away opens nationwide on November 3