Deconstructing C-3PO: Anthony Daniels talks ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’

by W. Andrew Powell
Anthony Daniels and the C-3PO costume

Anthony Daniels may not be a household name, but he plays one in Star Wars.

Daniels is the man behind the legend that is C-3PO–the golden, jabbering robot who so often provides comic relief in the massive Star Wars franchise–and he’s been doing it for nearly 40 years.

Ahead of the world premiere for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Daniels was in Toronto to talk about the history of the films, and what it meant to return to the universe that is Star Wars once again. Speaking with the star was a real treat, especially as a Star Wars fan. He’s friendly, personable, passionate, and captivating, and a mere 20 minutes with Daniels was literally awe-inspiring.

Sitting down to talk about C-3PO, the first thing Daniels was struck by was the poster for The Force Awakens, which he had only seen online before that moment. Where was C-3PO in that mix of characters? Right in the center of the poster, “and where he belongs,” the star said with a smile.

The only surprise that came out of the conversation was when Daniels reflected on his favorite character from the franchise.

“The bad guy I like,” Daniels said, “is Darth Maul. He is totally my favorite.”

“I love that bit where he is chopped in half. Ray Park, he does this… ‘So what happened?’ [look]. Literally he is my favorite because he is totally evil.”

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is in theatres now. Read our full interview with the charming star below.


Question: What’s it like working on this film with so much secrecy?

Anthony Daniels: “Well, it actually becomes second nature because you know, we all have huge respect for the whole story of Star Wars, the whole thing that is Star Wars, huge respect. How can you not? We have huge respect for George Lucas, who started it. We have huge respect for [director] J.J. [Abrams] and I would say huge respect for the fans because why would we want to spoil something?”

“Why would I sit here? You want to know what happens next? It might make me… you like me, or something, except I wouldn’t want something to do with that and it becomes absolutely second nature to the point that I realized the other day, when I was talking to the guy who’s writing the making of, the book.”

“He said something and I said, ‘Can I tell you a secrets?’ because my brain was so conditioned at this point that I thought, ‘Is it okay to tell this man?’ but I said to him, ‘No, that’s wrong. It’s changed. It changed in the script,’ and he ran off to phone the studio.”

“Look, when you’re buying a present for a friend for Christmas, well, you don’t tell them, ‘I’m getting you this.’ You wait for the surprise on their face. Well, next week you’ll all have a surprise on your face.”

Question: Well, I’m wondering what it’s like for you to be back in the franchise again?

Daniels: “What’s it like for me to be back is… it’s a very good question but the curious thing is that there may be gaps in over the 40 years but basically, it’s been a steady line for me–the whole thing–which includes all of the movies, all the television stuff, and in one of my earliest trips to Canada was with Nirvana Productions, I was over here every month doing–what’s it called, [the animated] Droids. Great, job, and maybe that’s where I learned to like Canada, so I feel so at home here in Toronto.”

“Now I will tell you that we got back from New York about three weeks ago–four weeks ago, where I’d been opening The Power of Costume. Now, if you go to New York, or it comes here, I don’t know where it’s going, it’s the Smithsonian exhibition. [This is] the most stunning exhibition just off Times Square.”

“When I was, yet again, being the front of Star Wars; Disney, Lucas, all these names come together because I do have the ability to present and you know, a bit like C-3PO on a good day. There I was doing the grand opening and that, which was huge fun and seriously a wonderful–it’s worth going because the way the costume is, you’re this close and they’re beautifully presented with lighting and backdrops.”

“And there’s C-3PO and R2D2, and of course BB-8–you wait; you are so going to love BB-8, seriously. But, I get off the plane at 6:30 in the morning and at 4:30 in the afternoon I’m putting my voice again on some more scenes with J.J. in London, with jetlag. So if he sounds a bit weird, it’s the jetlag. [Laughs]”

“But C-3PO has rarely left my side because I do all the cartoon series, whether it’s Clone Wars or Rebels or that kind of thing because I don’t have to wear the costume.”

Question: So you can do the role in your pajamas, essentially?

Anthony Daniels: “Yeah, pretty much. You do have to be careful with these things. You don’t wear clothes that make sounds… I can get pretty tired because 3PO actually is, you see, on the set, he’s very uptight and his voice is very up here [doing the voice of C-3PO]. To a certain extent that’s from tummy muscles and around the back here and also up here [indicating his chest]. If you saw me doing it, you’d laugh because it looks like I’m wearing the costume, because that’s how he is on the set and that’s how my voice is on the set, you see.”

“If you’re there you go, ‘I can see the costume, I can see it.'”

“So, I have the best of both worlds. Being able to be 3PO without the costume but then having the fun, the thrill, I don’t know what you would could it really, of walking out on the first day of filming in all these films, dressed up and people… walking out on that first day of The Force Awakens, everybody’s childhood suddenly walking in on the set, and J.J. is beside himself.”

“Oh, and actually, when we were remaking the costume… I had forgotten this, because they 3-D printed it for this time, because I said it’s the new way to do it. If it doesn’t quite work you can go off and make another one fairly quickly, and that will be better. But when J.J. came in when I was trying a bit on, and I really didn’t have the whole thing, he’s like, click, click–taking endless pictures and selfies. And that continued all the way through. You know, his enthusiasm on the set.”

“Being able to be 3PO all this time… the only difference being on the set, I’ve done a lot of Lego series lately–Star Wars Lego–utterly brilliant. A huge joy. Michael Price’s scripts are just–sometimes we’re crying. He’s usually driving up the 405 in Los Angeles and the producer is the studio but we’re all linked together on the phones. Sometimes he’s had to pull the car over because he’s just laughing so much because we swap lines around and we have fun. Of course, 3PO on the set of The Force Awakens is not… it’s not a Lego fun thing. It’s quite a chapter you’re going to see. You’ll like it.”

Andrew Powell: I have so many questions but the one I want to ask first is what do you think makes C-3PO and R2-D2 so timeless and so loved with such broad appeal?

Anthony Daniels: “Well, I think you’re right, they’re fairly broad characters to be honest. 3PO, if I gave that performance as a human being, you’d go… not sure. Because I don’t know where he came from.”

“I think one of the clever things about R2 is that… R2 is totally silent in filming… [Ben Burtt] mixed all those synthesized sounds with something that you recognize as being visceral, as being human and its kind anthropomorphous and it draws you in. It’s like… I’ve just remembered, I did a satellite navigation thing for the car. It drove me crazy. The strangeness of my voice telling me something I would have no idea of, it was slightly sinister so I use somebody else’s voice now. I have just recorded another one, for Waze, which is slightly more fun.”

“So, one thing you do relate to the sound that Ben Burtt came up with, with 3PO he’s incredibly vulnerable because very, very early on, we understand that he was programmed for protocol and etiquette–technically useless–no point in that. You first find him out wherever he is but then in the desert, you know tumbling about and he’s looking for the place with canopies and he wants to serve cocktails. He’s out in the desert and he’s all manky and everything.”

“He’s always in the wrong place and the wrong time and nobody cares about him. They’re always getting on with like, ‘Oh, yeah, shut up,’ and he’s always trashed. Now many of us in our lives are trashed by the government, state, the tax office… nobody cares about us, actually, so George planned them as the cover, to be the archetype of the ordinary man–the man on the street if you will. Nobody really cares about the man on the street because it’s slightly; how do you say? It’s a nothing word. It’s the invisible man, the man on the street so who are you? We don’t care.”

“There is that recognition that you share their lot in life. Yeah, it’s my lot, we were made to suffer, it’s our lot in life. It’s all coming back to me now–it’s scary. At the same time, of course we have the joy of that relationship but you realize that C-3PO is insecure. He’s not doing his proper job and nobody really respects him.”

“He’s a benign character so you feel a kind of affection for him and also of course now, he’s become this thread, which George did plan in the nine movies that he originally predicated, he did say that the droids would be the only ones to go through. How lucky am I?”

Question: You mentioned that the costume this time is 3D printed. Have they gotten better at making it more comfortable for you?

Anthony Daniels: “It still is not the greatest thing but they made changes particularly with how things fit together.”

“One of the things I do quite like is whereas they used to have a microphone here [on his forehead] and a wire that had to be stuck to my head and a transmitter shoved down my backside, so I am speaking to you out of my butt all through the movies, I now have a miniaturized microphone and transmitter in the space that’s there [on the bridge of his nose]. Also, I love the fact that for C-3PO’s eyes, if the scene is dark, you might want to make them dim a bit and if it’s bright out in the desert, you might want to lift them up.”

“The technology, the invisible technology has moved on. The suit will always be… not great, but it’s part of the job. I’m not the only one… there are some wonderful creatures of all sorts in the movies.”

Question: Not many people get to play with a character for as many years as you have. I’m curious, how has the experience changed for you as a performer? I’m curious, has C-3PO evolved over the experience for you?

Anthony Daniels: Well, 3PO, he can’t really evolve because he’s a machine. I mean, what you see on a television certainly is so the content changes and 3PO’s content, if you like, changes due to circumstances. He’s not proactive as a character. Things have to happen to him, so he’s reactive. He will always be the machine and you must remember if you do that, you see, in the first two trilogies, I had the first and the last line. Do you remember that? What was the first line? What was the last line?”

“I had the last line in episode three.”

“‘Did you hear that? They shut down the main reactor. We’ll be destroyed for sure. This is madness. There’ll be no escape for the princess this time.'”

“And the last line was what?”

“It’s when Bail Organa says, ‘Get the Protocol minds wiped.’ ‘What? Oh, no,’ and that’s the last line of the movie.”

“So you see, 3PO doesn’t remember a lot of stuff. He does not know for instance that Darth Vader is his daddy. Oh, did you know that? I’m not totally with it on some. Yeah, did any of you see Star Wars in concert when it came through? We did right across Canada and everywhere else but it was the whole story of Star Wars from beginning to end so it wasn’t totally with the details before that to the extent that on Episode One, George said, ‘You were made by Anakin Skywalker,’ and I thought it was really good because Anakin was a very good friend on the first movie and three days later, ‘Wait a minute, Anakin’s Darth Vader’. 3PO still doesn’t know. C-3PO, hopefully, he’s more reflective in every sense of the word, so he depends on what happens to him to push on.”

Question: Well, you talk about playing this character for several years but it’s been such a long time since you’ve been working with people like Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.

Anthony Daniels: “Harrison Ford was brilliant. I’s like he left the set of Return of the Jedi which was many years ago and just walked back in the room [for The Force Awakens]. He just made me laugh so much. I think you will be delighted.”

“And his ankle–he was so brave about all that. When we saw him later, you wouldn’t have thought anything had happened.”

Question: Were you apprehensive at all about the fact George Lucas wasn’t involved with this and how long did it take you to get used to J.J. Abrams?

Anthony Daniels: “Have you met J.J.? Silly question. Not at all apprehensive about it because we’ve had other directors before. We had Irvin Kushner particularly, Richard Marquand, and George is this figurehead for the whole thing. You’re still in the hands of the master if you like. That wasn’t a question that came up… and I think Mark Hamell said this is the most wonderful thing, this new thing.”

“It didn’t exactly come out of nowhere but it does feel like a gift because this one was huge fun to me and I believe that fun is going to come out on the screen if 3PO survives and of course, we don’t know that, do you?”

“Look, we only finished it three weeks ago; I put my voice in it. I’m genuinely excited believe it or not because the bits I’ve seen have intrigued me so much and Christine [Savage, Daniels’ wife] as well. Christine is in it.”

“Well, what was great was that all the extras clearly loved being there and there were some fairly elderly ones who said, ‘I saw when it first came out and I’m just amazed that I’m in it now,’ and they were pretty tough circumstances in some of these set ups and some of the shots. I was very impressed.”

“Talking about the secrecy, one of the actors said to me that he felt so intruded upon because he said he was now in costume and makeup and stuff and then a drone comes [flying] over. He knew that was wrong because he was very much a part of the family. J.J. made everybody feel a part of the family.”

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