In a sketch titled “LEAKED: Footage From Inside No 10 Downing Street”, the actor appeared dressed as May in her signature blue suit, fixated on her “precious” agreement for the UK to withdraw from the EU.

The clip sees Serkis recreate a famous scene from The Two Towers, in which the fantasy character’s two competing personalities, Gollum and Sméagol, argue – here over whether Brexit is truly in the nation’s best interests.

“We takes back control – money, borders, laws, blue passportses,” May as Gollum says; before May as Sméagol replies: “No, it hurts the people, makes them poorer.”

The actor shared the video on Twitter with the caption: “We’s in a nasty mess my precioussss...and there’s only one way out....We wants it. We neeeeds it!”

The clip was posted ahead of Tuesday’s Brexit vote in the House of Commons, while pressure for a second referendum continues to mount.

Serkis’s directorial effort, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, debuted on Netflix last week.

The Independent’s Alexandra Pollard called the film “relentlessly, discordantly bleak. So bleak you almost admire Serkis’s audacity. But too often the film stumbles around in its own darkness and falls flat. It is, to paraphrase Kaa, not quite a kid’s film, not quite an adult’s one. Or neither. Or both.”

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