Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Star Owen Teague Reveals the Hardest Thing About Becoming Noa

The Planet of the Apes franchise is returning this year, with the release of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in May. While the past three Apes films have centered around Andy Serkis’ Caesar, this new film from Wes Ball moves into an entirely new time period in the Apes story. , so the characters are completely new. Caesar is long gone, and Noa is the ape now at the center of the story.

Noa, played by Owen Teague, is a young ape who is conflicted about his place in this new and changing world. Naturally, given his place as the lead character in the film, Noa will be compared to Caesar, but the two characters have a ton of differences. One such difference is in the way they speak, as Noa exists at a time where apes are much more evolved than they were during Caesar’s time.

Teague recently spoke to ComicBook.com about his role in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and we asked about the biggest challenge in bringing Noa to life. For Teague, the difficulty all came in creating his character’s voice.

“Yeah, the physical part of it almost came too naturally,” Teague told us. “Not to brag, but it’s not, and I don’t say that as necessarily a good thing. I say that as I might be part chimpanzee. Apparently I walked like an ape now. People have said this. They were like, ‘Wow, you really stuck with it, huh?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not trying to do that. It’s just my walk.’ But the voice was really tough because Caesar, he speaks in a way that feels like an ape trying to talk. Makes a lot of sense. We’re 300 years into the future and these apes have really mastered speech, like to the point where the orangutan in the film, he just talks like a guy.”

“Noa’s not quite on that level, but finding a voice, not doing the gravelly Caesar thing, using my own voice and adding a little bit of rasp, but still keeping it high,” Teague continued. “It was scary because we’ve never heard an ape talk like that before. And I was like, I don’t know if this is going to work, where like, I open my mouth and people hear this come out, if people are going to be like, ‘That’s insane.’ Because when Caesar talks it’s not weird because he talks like this. Same goes for Kevin who plays Proximus. He’s got a very guttural kind of thing happening. Noa doesn’t, which I think works for the character but also is an entirely new kind of ape. So that was tough. Not only finding it but also being okay with it and trusting the want.”

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is set to hit theaters on May 10th.