I WAS brought up in Ruislip, but my father was a doctor in Iraq, so nearly all my memories of childhood holidays involve the Middle East. We would fly over to Baghdad, which I recall as a magical land of mosques — with roundabouts featuring Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. We’d go on trips all over the region, exploring places such as Damascus or the ruins of Babylon, and take in Beirut, which really was the Paris of the East before the troubles started. I feel very blessed that I was able to experience all that as it was. Then, when I was 14, things began to get dodgy and we couldn’t travel out there any longer.

It was about that time that I got interested in climbing, which became, and remains, a passion. Myself and a few mates formed a mountaineering club at school and progressed from hill walking through trekking to proper climbing. When I went to Lancaster University, it was because it had a good visual-arts course, but it was a real bonus that the Lakes were on the doorstep. I still climb whenever I get the chance, but the last big undertaking was a solo ascent of the Matterhorn, and that must have been about nine years ago.

It’s harder now the kids have come along. I did notice, when I was climbing in New Zealand as we were just about to have our second child, feeling I didn’t quite have the edge I once had — just not being willing to take that little extra risk. Perhaps that’s something to do with being a dad. Mind you, I am trying to introduce the kids to the mountains, slowly — taking them up on cable cars, a bit of gentle hill walking, to give them a feel for why I love it so much.

I adore New Zealand — I spent so long there during the filming of The Lord of the Rings, I fell in love with the people, the culture and, of course, that landscape. If it weren’t for extended family and friends, I think I’d live there like a shot. It’s just a shame it’s so far away. I do suffer from jet lag — it always takes me a good few days to recover. It’s irritating to hear about people who don’t get affected at all. My parents and in-laws, for instance: they seem to be able to shrug it off. But I really do feel it. Plus, flying with the kids can be a little fraught. Not with the older ones so much, but Louis, the youngest, is just 18 months — still at the age where he’s perfectly capable of kicking a tray of airline food in the air if you dare try to eat with him on your lap.

Another place that’s important to me is Italy. It’s a bolt hole, in a way. When I met my wife, Lorraine, we had our first holiday out there, in the mountains just over the border from Chamonix. Later on, we’d get a VW camper van and drive from Hackney all the way down to Sicily. We ended up getting married out there, in Greve in Chianti, and then had a big party in Fiesole, just north of Florence.

For the character of Kong, I went to London Zoo to watch the gorillas, but it wasn’t right. I ended up going to Rwanda to observe mountain gorillas in the wild, with a company called Rainbow Tours, who were fantastic. It’s a really beautiful country and, of course, they have this great resource in the gorillas. We followed a pack of 23. You have to keep an exclusion zone of about seven metres, because they’re very susceptible to human diseases. But even so, to be that close, to get a sense of the physicality of them, the expressiveness, to smell them, it really is quite humbling. They’re social animals, very, very enigmatic, with individual personalities. It reminded me in a strange way of a group of people lying around at the Reading festival. There was the moody one and the inquisitive one and the bone-idle one. There is this striking sense of how close to humans they really are, something you absolutely could never get on television or a video. Like so much in travel, you really have to go out there and experience it for yourself.

Andy Serkis talked to Rob Ryan

Times recommends

• The 20 best winter sun destinations
• Australia's five best roadtrips
• The Scotland shooting lodge that targets greenies