English actor, director, and motion-capture pioneer Serkis is a thrill-seeker in life—he writes here of his successful “solo assault” on the Matterhorn—and also in his art. His attitude is distilled in his initial response to being asked to play Ulysses Klaue in Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): “Charismatic South African villain who gets his arm chopped off? Count me in.” Such an adventuresome spirit can’t be expected to write a straightforward memoir or even to give it a straightforward title. (This one plays on Gollum’s catchphrase, “my precious.”) Periodically interrupting Serkis’ chronological account of his life, which began in a London suburb in 1964, are scripts in which the author converses with a handful of characters he has played on-screen. These exchanges tend to take the book to darker places than the good-natured Serkis seems to want to go—e.g., British serial killer Ian Brady says to Serkis, who played Brady in the TV movie Longford (2006), “You can’t face living with who you are, so you have to leech off the lives of others, who are so much more truthful than you.” Might it be that, as is posited on the book’s last page, these scripted interactions are included because Serkis doesn’t “trust that his own story is interesting enough?” That would have been a fear unfounded. Serkis is an engagingly self-effacing chronicler, and readers will likely leave this book seeing the humor, as the author seems to, in the fact that this mainstay of multiple film franchises hawked Socialist Worker newspapers on the streets of London not long before his acting career took him to otherworldly places.