Lydia Peckham had climbed one of the taller trees in her family’s apple orchard in New Zealand, strapping a camera to a neighboring branch with a bungee cord and placing herself opposite it.
The reason for Peckham’s impromptu jaunt through the foliage was Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Unlike the other Planet of the Apes entries, this one would be populated with nearly all CGI apes, one of which Peckham had been asked to audition to play. “When I first got the audition, I thought, ‘Oh, my god, how am I gonna act like an ape in front of a white wall?’ It seemed like a recipe for disaster,” she remembers. She instead hatched the idea to do the self-tape from an apple tree.
She laughs, “You always hear those crazy audition stories, and there are only a few projects that it actually works for.” It did, in fact, work, with Peckham landing the role as the chimpanzee named Soona.
After an itinerant childhood that took her family from Edinburgh to the West Coast of Scotland and then to France, Peckham grew up in New Zealand on the apple orchard without a television but with ample idle time. She discovered acting in high school by way of Shakespeare, and a state-sponsored program that let her travel to England, where she played Ariel in The Tempest on both the Old Globe stage and the Minack Theatre in Cornwall. When she returned, she enrolled in drama school, after which, she says, “From there, the hustle began.”
Her first big studio role was in the Wes Ball-directed Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which takes place a long while after the other recent Planet of the Apes entries, with Apes firmly established as the dominant species on Earth. Various ape tribes fight for dominance, while human history has largely become the stuff of lore.
After being cast, Peckham had six weeks of what she calls “Ape training.” Says the actress, “Usually you’re starting with the script.” Instead, the pre-production prep was focused on physical performance. “Rather than diving in first with your brain, it was about how your body can interpret something.”
As for filming, Peckham welcomed the atypical acting realities of the motion capture performance. “There’s zero ego,” she says. “Number one, you are dressed in a gray suit with 100 dots on you. Number two, you are making sounds and moving in such an obscure way. It shreds some of that self-consciousness.”
But her next project, Nuremberg, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, proved very different from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. “I did this one just in a slightly more standard audition way,” she says. (Read: no tree.)
The James Vanderbilt-directed historical drama follows WWII psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), who evaluates Nazi leaders for the Nuremberg trials and is tasked with determining if Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) is fit to stand trial. Leo Woodall, John Slattery and Richard E. Grant are among the film’s other stars.
In the movie, Peckham plays one of the few fictional characters, Lila, a journalist covering the trials. With no real-life counterpart to study, ahead of filming, she researched female journalists of the time.
“What I didn’t know was that WWII was actually part of the liberation of women,” she says. “Women stepped into roles that they’d never really been allowed enter, and when men came back, they were like, ‘No, we will stay.’” To help her performance, she thought of Lila as a part of that movement, saying, “She puts the work first.”
Nuremberg, which will be released in theaters on Nov. 7 by Sony Pictures Classics, was positively reviewed out of TIFF, with The Hollywood Reporter’s review reading, “Vanderbilt’s commanding Nuremberg couldn’t have arrived at a more consequential time.” It has been tapped as a possible awards contender.
As for what’s next for Peckham, she is taking on yet another genre, this time folklore, playing Priscilla of Nottingham in MGM’s Robin Hood series that stars Sean Bean and Connie Nielsen.
After projects that have spanned a post-human far future, a 1940s post-wartime tribunal and 14th-century England, Peckham is hoping for something set in the present day. She says, “Just to branch out of the shackles of time.”