Rings star Serkis set to play Einstein

(Reuters)
Updated: 2007-03-29 10:03

Andy Serkis, the English actor best known for playing Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films, will star as Albert Einstein in a TV movie about one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century: the creation of Einstein's theory of relativity.

Einstein and Eddington, a collaboration between HBO Films and the BBC, will co-star David Tennant.

The project chronicles Einstein's work on the theory that he began while he was a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office. After his 1905 paper on special relativity, Einstein spent almost a decade developing the theory of general relativity, which introduces the notion of curvature in space-time.

Scientist Sir Arthur Eddington (Tennant) was one of the most prominent astrophysicists in the first decades of the 20th century and the first physicist who understood Einstein's ideas of relativity.

Einstein and Eddington kept a correspondence while their countries squared off in World War I. Because of the military conflict, no new developments in German science were being made known to the rest of the world.

So it was Eddington's 1920 article, which offered proof of the relativity theory of gravitation using data from the 1919 solar eclipse, that introduced Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world.

Einstein and Eddington was written by Peter Moffat, with Philip Martin set to direct. The two worked together on Hawking, the BBC's 2004 biopic of Stephen Hawking, who is considered the greatest mind in physics since Einstein and took Einstein's general relativity theory one step further, unifying it with quantum theory.

This is not the first time HBO has explored unlikely scientific partnerships. Its 2004 film Something the Lord Made, about the relationship between heart surgery pioneers Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas – who were divided by race and social status – won an Emmy for best TV movie.

Serkis recently co-starred in The Prestige, which featured another science genius, Nikola Tesla.