Oh hello!

I'm Anthony Daniels,

and this is every version of C-3PO

from the Star Wars movies.

Plans, what are you talking about?

I'm not getting in there. [laser firing]

[beeping]

I'm going to regret this.

[dramatic music]

You know I am famous for having turned down

the opportunity to be in Star Wars.

Back in 1975, I hadn't wanted to meet a director

called George Lucas, but I did.

But I wasn't interested in this sci-fi movie until I saw

Ralph McQuarrie's conceptual artwork of the character.

He had created this androids figure

that was standing, looking out of the frame towards me.

And it really connected, I fell in love with it.

I slightly think 3PO fell in love with me,

but I'm not sure.

Did you hear that? [beeping]

They shut down the main reactor.

We'll be destroyed for sure.

This is madness!

The concept of the character

was actually based on a film from way back in time,

Metropolis by Fritz Lang and in that film,

the powers that be created a fake human

to try and encourage the workers to behave

and George had Ralph McQuarrie create something similar.

The similarity would be that neither of us,

the original actor or myself,

could actually move in these costumes very well.

When I read the script, I really liked C-3PO

so I was very, very happy to go the next day

to Elstree Studioses in North London

and be cast for the part.

And I don't mean, did I get the part,

no, I mean that I was actually covered in plaster

to make a mold of my body

that would be the frame to make the actual robot suit.

Well, I have to tell you that being cast in plaster

is not something I would recommend,

especially the bit where they shove straws up your nose

so that they can model your head.

Eventually, there in the studio

was my figure in white plaster with very little clothing on.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

But then came along Liz Moore, the sculptor.

Over the next few weeks, Liz began to cover my white body

with gray modeling clay

and she built up the shape

that you eventually see in the finished figure.

All these little lines and curlicues and shapes

were a reference to that Fritz Lang movie.

I'd be in the studio most days

and they would try out a new piece on me,

it might be an arm or a leg or a neck or a head or

a something and sometimes they were paper prototypes,

sometimes they were made of plastic, thin plastic.

The most interesting thing for me

was when it came to 3PO's face.

I remember coming into a room

and there were I think six heads on a kind of high table

and actually, they were all terrific in their gray clay.

There was this one and I said to George,

the only one I don't like is this one at the end,

he said, Oh, that's the one we're using.

[laughs]

In my defense, he didn't look anything like he turned out

because when he turned out in gold,

I felt 3PO

was beautiful.

There's no way 3PO can ever exist without a whole team

and that was right from the beginning.

First of all, of course, George Lucas,

who thought up the idea,

Norman Reynolds and then down to Phil McDonald,

Maxie, my dresser, who was not from the wardrobe department

but from props, 'cause basically, I was a prop.

Maxie and his fellow workers would join in the team

because I needed more than Maxie it turned out.

It was way more complicated to costume than anybody thought.

And so on that first day, I think there was six people

coming in from all angles to dress me up in it.

And I really rely on, always relied on

the kindness of the crew and the people who really care

about making this comfortable as was possible,

which wasn't that much.

But gradually, they built up the team,

under Norman Reynolds

who worked with the plasters department

and the plastics department, all these clever prop makers,

and they came up eventually,

with all the bits and pieces to make a robot.

And I tried it on in the special effects studio at Elstree

and for the first time,

I had that suit in its entirety around me,

it was horrible.

I had completely lost connectivity with my body, the world.

I literally blundered around the studio

because I couldn't really see,

apart from the eyes in the center

and I had no idea what my elbows were doing,

which were way bigger than my elbows,

my shoulders were bigger, my legs were kind of trapped.

After about 15 minutes, we took it off.

What a relief.

I never saw it again until a month later.

There out in a tent in the desert

and there were all the pieces, 17 pieces I think,

laid out and gradually, over a two hour period,

they covered me in this gold.

We started off with black tights

and a black leotard and a black hood.

The next bit would be, well, a slightly more sensitive area,

the front and the back

and these were two pieces of very thin plastic

that had been vacuum formed

and they put these around me and over the corset thing.

Then they took gold tape and stuck that down the side,

so now the two parts, front and back, had become one.

Next, really complicated,

there was the top half of the leg

that was attached to the bottom half, the calf,

with a sort of, well, literally a bungee cord at either side

that stretched down between two nodules.

This allowed the piece to work like that

to keep them locked together with the knee,

which had these kind of interlocking fragments like that.

They came down and to get that on,

Maxie, my dresser and the team

turned it the wrong way,

I put my foot through it all the way down

and then when it was in there,

they turned it round and pinned

the back on so now my leg was locked in there.

Before that, they put on my deck shoe,

a deck shoe being a little rubber-soled canvas thing

with a kind of white rubber round there

and nice blue canvas top,

sort of thing you'd wear if you were out sailing,

but here we weren't, this was mainly the under-shoe,

because the top of 3PO's foot was all the foot there was,

it was just a foot, bang.

A gold cover that looked beautiful,

again made out of very thin plastic.

And then we came after the top section,

the front and the back.

[clicking]

I was locked in there,

I wasn't going anywhere without this suit.

Then an arm came up,

I had black cotton gloves on as well

and then a hand and these were strange pieces of just

knuckles and joints and things

glued onto black cotton gloves.

Maxie had glued them on the night before.

The glue had set before we could take them off

and basically we had to [groans]

wrench them off my hands for me to go to sleep that night.

We had two necks,

one was split down the back

and pinned together

and that was for the camera to shoot from the front.

The other one was for the camera to shoot from the back

and that had a split down the front.

I know, stay with me.

I think we'd been two hours doing this,

hour and a half at least,

then came the final torture

which was to take the face and the back,

almost like an Easter egg, cut in half, right,

put them together like that

and here's the clever bit.

Well, it seemed a good idea at the time.

They took the kind of earring thing here

and they pointed it through the hole in the side of the face

which joined to the hole in the back of the head

and then poked it through into a bayonet fitting,

like a light bulb, old fashioned light bulb

in the neck.

Trouble was that this was quite hard on the day

because you had to line up these holes and the pin

and push against something

that pushed away when you pushed it.

After half an hour, I'm not exaggerating,

they finally locked these pins into shape.

And at which point they, [clicks]

the same bayonet type fitting

but far easier, just two pieces.

So we had the whole 3PO look

and that first day, when I walked out into the desert,

nobody had ever seen that shape, that figure before

and through the little pinhole eyes,

I could scan all the people in front of me,

the crew who were standing

as the morning sun rose up over the desert

and their reaction was extraordinary.

They were variously either very charmed or completely crazy,

they just, wow, look at that, sort of thing.

And finally,

3PO was complete apart from one thing

that Maxie put his hand up behind 3PO's back

and under that little back plate,

there's a tiny switch [clicks]

that connected the six batteries within that little box

to a wire that came over inside my head

that had been joined to another wire,

which was connected to the eyes,

so we had a full circuit from those little eyes

and so with a flick of the switch,

suddenly 3PO had become alive for the very first time.

My friend C-3PO, of course, looks fantastic

but there was one thing that, at that point, was missing

because one of 3PO's attributes,

he loves to talk.

He's a translator, fluent in over

six millions forms of communication.

How was this gonna happen?

I'd had six months to think,

I don't know.

I'm only a droid,

I'm not very knowledgeable about such things.

So here was day one and I still didn't know

what was gonna happen, what was I gonna do,

I was there in the desert,

I was hurting, I was pained,

I had learned the words, sort of,

I'd never been in a film,

so the word action

was terrifying.

Quite terrifying. [laughs]

But at that moment, something came to my aid,

some kind of movie magic, some kind of force, whatever,

because at that moment, that precise moment, 3PO came alive.

Why, sir, my first job is programming binary load lifters

very similar to your vaporators in most respects.

Can you speak Bocce?

Of course I can, sir, it's like a second language to me,

I'm as fluent in-- All right, shut up.

Well, I can say it now. [laughs]

I couldn't say it on the day.

I think that my nervousness, my

discombobulation of everything

made me flumble the lines like crazy.

Third time I got it wrong, George kind of

frowned and walked over and stared 3PO in the eye

and therefore me in the eye,

You can say anything you like, don't worry about the voice,

I can fix it later.

I was embarrassed because as an actor,

I like to get the lines right.

So then I carried on and in that case,

on the fourth take, I said

Why sir, my first job was ba-wa-wa-wa-wa.

Perfect, cut.

Of course, George knew

that he could put in a proper voice later.

'cause when your head is inside a bucket,

you don't sound so good.

That sound [mumbles],

you can't possibly use that kind of vocal quality.

Even though the microphones was here

and a little microphones cable was going

all the way down my back into my pants,

those two bits of plastic stuck together,

and the transmitter was shoved somewhere really quite warm,

yes, I was speaking to you all the time out of my butt.

But it's supposed to be freezing.

How we're going to dry off all the clothes,

I really don't know.

[beeping] Oh, switch off!

The huge success of A New Hope

meant that suddenly, we were making a second film,

The Empire Strikes Back, number five,

I know, the math has always confused me a bit

but 3PO was back there again

and now people had had a chance

to kind of study the costume a little more,

some things were changed to make things easier.

For The Empire Strikes Back,

the costume was basically the same

and some of the improvements maybe saved time

but it was still a struggle to,

to be C-3PO. [laughs]

The shoes were one piece,

they were no longer the deck shoes with the cover.

They were opened at the back and my foot went in

and then believe it or not, again with the gold tape,

they were taped up or tied sometimes with shoelaces.

One thing I want to remind you of,

back in the day in Episode Four,

3PO didn't have two gold legs.

He had one silver shin.

A lot of people didn't notice it.

And the reason is it was kind of subtle

and the silver actually reflected the gold of the other leg

and also in the desert,

it reflected the gold of the sand

to such an extent, that John Jay,

the beloved stills photographer,

and he'd been shooting [clicks],

stills all through the shoot,

on the last day in the desert,

he came up to me and said,

Tones, why are you wearing a silver leg today?

and I thought, huh?

A blind cameraman, who knew?

I've got to rest before I fall apart.

My joints are almost frozen.

People still argue, does 3PO have a silver leg?

The point of the silver shin,

that would come to haunt me many years later

in The Force Awakens,

was to say that 3PO had had a bit of a history,

that he'd had some kind of drama before this, you know,

but it was so subtle that hardly anybody noticed.

3PO was there and still fairly mobiles.

I had, in fact, been tap dancing on The Muppet Show

just a few months before

but again, I was younger.

You, you're next!

I certainly don't dance.

No, but this is our big ending!

Oh, all right.

[cheerful music]

For The Empire Strikes Back,

I also had, well, 3PO had new hands.

They still didn't work but they were new.

And they were one piece plastic,

very much looked like the originals

but had been made on a new mold

and split open under here and I would wiggle my hand in,

wearing a black glove to, you know,

wearing plastic on your skin is not nice

so the glove was still essential

just to cover me on the inside.

So now I had these beautiful plastic gloves

that were this shape

and whatever I did, they remained this shape.

It was like Curse of the Plastic Hands.

Nothing we can do.

And my joints are freezing up.

Eventually, they would soften with body heat

and so on so that I could,

with pressure, bend them like this.

If I wanted to point over there,

I would, by the side of my body, curl these fingers around,

hold them against my body with my finger extended

and then at the last minute, on cue go,

Oh, look!

If I'd stay there much longer [clicks], you know,

they were not great, again,

the wrong materials or different,

everyone was trying,

this is not a criticism, it's a list of facts, okay.

Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough,

it's all my fault!

The pants section, as we'll call them,

those two originally were in two pieces.

The second film, these were one piece and they were,

we made a little casting of this part of my body, it's,

by now, I was inure to the humiliation and things

actors have to go through to keep a part, you know,

so they made this kind of little mini section statue of me

and then cast that in a kind of heavier, rubbery plastic

which meant that it was one piece

so you couldn't just strap it around me,

I had to wiggle into it

and again, in a rather undignified wiggling motion.

If you study C-3PO close up,

freeze frame and look at various parts of his body,

there are wear marks.

He's machine, I guess you get that anyway,

but if you look here, you'll see that within moments,

the gold finish because it was a paint,

you see there are score marks here

where the paint is totally gone.

So you know it's gray metal, it's aluminum.

Here, this is difficult for the team

because they need to find a gold finish

that would attach to plastic

which was semi-mobiles

so again, you'll see all sorts of flaking

but the overall effect, as the movie sweeps by,

you don't see all this stuff, you don't want to see it,

you're not looking for that,

you're looking for the whole story of the gold character

that's going on these adventures with his friends.

Oh, I...

There were a lot of fun things in The Empire Strikes Back

but the scary thing and the fun thing was

reading on the page, 3PO in Cloud City,

something's going on in this side hall here

so he goes in and you hear him say,

Oh, pardon me, oh, no, don't get up.

[banging]

I was out of a job.

I scurried through the next few pages.

He wasn't dead yet, he wasn't finished.

Chewbacca went and found bits of 3PO

as they headed towards the fiery furnace

of meltdown, one of his great dreads.

Chewbacca was there to drag him

and put him in his bits.

And so now 3PO's performance, my performance,

was in pieces.

Literally, in pieces.

[Han] Stop, stop!

Yes, stop, please, I'm not ready to die!

Peter Mayhew, who was Chewbacca at the time,

had a bag of bits

and I've got to tell you that if you look carefully,

some fan has just discovered

there's an arm and a leg

and a other bit and this and that.

In fact, there were two arms, both right arms.

Props got it wrong [laughs], I love it.

'Cause I had all sorts of spare bits

and they just chucked bits in there

and didn't notice that they had two right arms.

I knew all along, had to be a mistake.

You gotta forgive them.

And the clever thing there was

Chewbacca, Peter Mayhew, he had a blaster

and on this end was a piece of fishing wire

attached through the costume to this, so when he did

that,

my head on the back was being animated by fishing wire,

so it kept the while thing alive.

R2, R2, where have you been?

Wait, turn round, you bully!

[beeping]

Hurry, hurry, we're trying to

save Han from the bounty hunters!

[beeping]

Well, at least you're still in one piece!

The more fun was when he put my head on backwards.

What have you done?

I'm backwards!

The only way to do it was to take a CP0 head,

cut out the back of the head

so his face was here, looking that way,

my face was sticking out of the back

which, from the side, is a bit difficult

because this bit's longer, especially this bit

so this bit kept peeking out of the side.

So they stuck gold tape on it

and I promise you, if you freeze-frame in that bit on

Chewbacca's knee, you will see for a moment

a kind of thing here and that is my nose.

Something's not right.

Not everything is perfect in Stars Wars,

not everything is photoshopped out, there's little moments.

But then there were other moments

that I would be on the floor

with my arm up through the 3PO chest into the face,

so that I could animate it a bit like

an old ventriloquist puppet

as I spoke the lines so I could animate as I spoke.

And when you put them together,

the audience believes it's one phenomenon.

The scariest bit for me was when 3PO

is standing in the middle of the fork in corridor

and he's holding a limb.

You haven't finished with me yet!

You don't know how to fix the hyperdrive.

Chewbacca can do it!

Down there, the leg is missing.

Now, these days, you do it with green screen technology,

or just clever computer stuff.

Then, no, it was me standing on one leg

with my other leg curled up behind me,

so in line with the camera so you couldn't see it

and holding this and balancing and speaking

and shouting I'm standing here in pieces

and you have delusions of grandeur!

[beeping]

I manage not to fall over but it was kind of scary

because falling in that costume is not good.

So a sitting down moment was even more fun

because there's a point later on

where 3PO is sitting on a box and R2's there

and he's got a foot and a welding torch

and he, in my book, he was saying,

and I'm saying, where do you think it goes?

But 3PO's legs are sticking straight

pretty much out towards camera,

so how did we do that?

How did we have me sitting footless on a box,

discussing how to attach my foot?

Yeah, you're right, I wasn't sitting on the box,

I was kneeling on the floor through the box

with my feet coming out of the side.

Magic.

Going to execute Master Luke

and if we're not careful, us too!

[beeping]

Hmm, I wish I had your confidence!

Pretty much, it is me always in the 3PO suit,

although young Jim was the one

who actually fell off the cliff

when the sand person attacked Luke Skywalker.

Jim was a member of the props department.

Apparently, he was dispensable because if I'd hurt myself,

filming would've come to a halt for a while,

whereas Jim wearing bits of my costume, nobody cared.

Bang.

I could've done it, it was easy,

just [clicks] out of camera onto a mattress.

A bigger stunt was in Return of the Jedi

where we are on Jabba's barge

and by now, 3PO's eye is hanging out,

Salacious Crumb has pulled it there

and I am edging towards the top of the handrail,

the handrail was missing on Jabba's barge

and I'm blindly, I mean,

I'm now seeing one-eyed with restricted vision.

Think about it.

And I'm about 60 feet up

and as we get to the rail, they'd say cut,

because I had stood as though as I was gonna fall over

and R2's behind me, the motorized R2 is nudging me forward,

that's part of the film,

so we get to my fall position, cut,

and then I relax and then Tracey Eddon, stunt person,

came in and she was wearing a rubber suit,

heaven knows what it felt like,

and she stood there and I showed her my hand position

and she took it,

she stood there and they said action

and she went forward and when you watch,

she twists round in the air and falls out of shot.

A few feet with mattresses

and underneath the mattresses are piles of cardboard boxes

and what they do is absorb the shock,

a bit like the front of your car

and she was absolutely fine, of course, she's a pro,

she was wonderful.

Here's a thing you don't know maybe.

A couple of hours later, she was back up on deck,

she'd taken off the rubber suit,

she was no longer 3PO, she was Princess Leia

and she is the one who sweeps across

to the barge over there to the skiff.

Wonderful skilled woman.

Did I hear someone mention my name?

This is really him!

Well, it's a real pleasure to meet you,

I've seen all your movies.

Of course, not all Star Wars is in the movies, right?

Some of the most amazing spin-offs

have been a great joy to me

and the chief one, Star Tours.

[beeping]

[Presenter] Now, in a kingdom very, very near.

[C-3PO] R2, do hurry, the passengers are boarding.

[beeping]

[Presenter] Now open at Disneyland.

Now, if you haven't ever ridden Star Tours

at one of the Disney parks,

I suggest you stop watching this video and go right now

because it is a superb rendition of the story,

in a way that involves you.

3PO is there to welcome you in the space board at Disney.

[Boy] 3PO looks real busy.

Well, we better not bother him.

He's there with R2, R2's mending, repairing the ship

and of course, getting it totally wrong

and then it blows up and it's all very exciting.

But to do this, they needed an animatronic C-3PO

so Tom Fitzgerald, the producer,

the head of the design team of Imagineers at Disney,

got me into his studio and said,

well, he told me the whole story

and I was sold from the moment I heard it.

And then he said, and our idea

is for you to come in this little mock-up set

and stand just in your jeans and a shirt

and play the scene C-3PO.

It was kind of funny, we had a camera and

I had a sandbag over one foot

and when I asked why, he said,

Well, that's where all the engineering

for the animatronics comes up into the frame that is C-3PO

and animates his actions

so we need to,

if you wouldn't mind to keep still on that leg

and we filmed the scene,

they recorded my voice and my actions so

R2, test the iron cannons

and here, I had a console

and I was poking buttons and R2 was helping things blow up

and they were using this as a guide.

He also asked me to look at the audience who were coming in,

the passengers who were coming down the space board,

around, around, around

and they would be, at this point,

about, I don't know, six feet, eight feet below me

looking up as they went by.

I turn from the console and

look to people

and then carried on what I was doing.

And of course, the inevitable happened.

When I stood there alone in the space board

before we opened, whilst re-rehearsing stuff,

I stood looking up at 3PO,

thinking just how brilliant Disney had been

in making a real robot out of a fake robot.

And at that point, as I was kind of admiring, he turned

and looked straight at me.

I'm getting goosebumps right now.

Where is Master Anakin?

[beeping]

Many years had passed after Return of the Jedi

and I actually thought Star Wars

was never gonna happen again,

I'd got on with life.

It was okay.

And then a phones call,

would I go and meet George Lucas

at Leavesden Studioses in North London?

Of course.

And we had a meeting about this new film and he said

You're created by Anakin.

You're built by Anakin, he's a kid.

Come on, I'll show you 3PO.

I just thought that was brilliant,

to have the sweetest character pretty much in the universe

to be made by one of the archest villains ever

so that was cool.

How it was achieved was a puppet

and the puppet was built at ILM Industrial Light and Magic

by Michael Lynch, one of the prop makers and designers.

[beeping] R2-D2 so beautifully put it,

naked.

[beeping]

My parts are showing, my!

It was exquisite, it was totally believable

as the insides of this.

And they didn't actually offer me

the option of puppeteering it,

Michael knew how it worked and it was his thing.

I gotta say I was disappointed,

I would've liked to have had a go

so basically, I was there as the voice,

often trying to match movements

that weren't particularly mine

but as George said,

He's just been made by a kid, what do you expect?

Fair point, fair point

but it was a total different dynamic, physical dynamic.

I accepted it, I had no choice

and I was fascinated by the puppet

which was really heavy and,

although they tried to take out as much heavy material,

but it still weighed, not a ton but intellectually, a ton

and, of course, was extremely realistic,

you could totally believe this was the inside.

So there we had the first film

and obviously, if you're making a prequel,

you're making number two the prequel

and at this point, I said,

Well, you know,

I'd feel better if you'd let me try and puppeteer it

because, kind of, it's my head,

my brain, my thought process.

Be careful what you wish for.

There I was with Don Bies, my new team head leader

and Justin Dix who would come back into the story

dressing up

as Puppet 3PO.

Now there's a Japanese art form,

theatrical art form called Bunraku

where you have the most beautiful puppets

and they are animated by performers

who are dressed in black

and you, the audience, accept they're not there.

It's fine, it's called suspension of disbelief

and so this creature was attached to my feet

so his heels were attached to my toes,

his knees to my knees, his waist to my waist, et cetera

and the arms were on the end of sticks at his elbow,

so that I could animate to some extent,

where he was touching things.

The head attached to my head to a helmet, like that.

The only trouble was, of course,

that his face was in front of my face

so I couldn't see, I had to guess who I was looking at.

Another challenge.

The whole thing pretty much rested on a heavy harness,

like a Steadicam harness that can take a lot of weight

and distribute it around your frame

and I rehearsed for days in creatures shop at Australia

and could walk pretty well in it

and all that kind of thing

and I was absolutely ready for my first shot,

having the most touching conversation with Padme Amidala

who, in the middle of the night,

because she couldn't sleep

was talking calmly and kindly with 3PO

and asking him if he was happy there and he said,

Well, I'm not unhappy, the people are lovely

but being like this...

Like what?

Naked, if you pardon the expression.

It wasn't easy for him

and in this scene, you suddenly had the inner mind

of this beloved droid who'd suffered for 18 years

for his nakedness.

And of course she, being Padme, being very clever, said

But there's a box of coverings right here.

My, I never noticed.

Truly one of the worst lines and I wrote it.

When you came back, there's Natalie Portman

holding the face of 3PO

and meantime, Don Bies had stuck the back of the head on me

and around here, had put fridge magnets.

I also had the lights, 3PO's eyes,

on a special rig that Don had made, a bit like spectacles,

so just the eyes and Natalie, [laughs]

on action had to maneuver this face.

[Padme] There.

Not quite.

I think about the third take, she did it

and there was 3PO,

whole as the shape of 3PO for the first time

and everybody was exquisitely happy, especially 3PO.

So, right from the beginning of the film,

we re-shot the 3PO scenes that had been puppets,

and we shot them on blue screen, green scene, any screen,

with a gold suit that Justin Dix

had done a wonderful paint job on to make it look rusty.

So here's a clue, if you ever go up to the rusty 3PO,

just scratch a bit and you see his gold skin underneath.

The big difference here was that,

because he always started off shiny,

there George is saying,

No, he needs to be dirtied down and

kind of made to look grungy and stuff.

So he was always a bit grungy, a bit oil-covered

and covered, indeed,

not so much in oil but in shoe polish and table wax.

In the script, I really didn't have much to do,

it was really concentrating on the decline and fall

of my creator, Anakin Skywalker.

I mean, it was tragic, not that 3PO would ever find out

and he still doesn't know so, you know, keep the secret.

Oh, a battle!

Oh, there's been some terrible mistake!

I'm programmed for etiquette, not destruction!

3PO's look is, of course, iconic, gold.

A dirty gold to begin with

and then bright shiny gold for Episode Three.

But then came a bit of a twist on this.

A clever piece of scripting.

3PO suffers an accident in some kind of robot factory

and he ends up with the body of a battle droid.

Ooh!

Oh, I'm so confused!

And to do it, what we did was in fact,

film me in full 3PO costume

and then they animated a suit around me.

I had a blaster, but again, 3PO's hands

were so difficult to manipulate

that they actually had to wire the gun onto me

so I could hold it right.

And I learned a fun thing.

As I came towards the camera,

the line was Die, Jedi dogs, die!

What did I say?

I will admit, those weren't the precise words I said

because I wanted to get a laugh

but what was interesting is I found that you couldn't go

Die, Jedi dogs, die or whatever words,

without going [imitates gunfire].

You've got to make the thing live for you, you know,

and that was kind of exciting and totally daft, actually.

3PO has no memory of it, so it's cool.

Oh, dear, I'm terribly sorry about all this!

For Revenge of the Sith,

which was obviously gonna be the final film,

they had made the collar, the neck a little bigger

so that it grated on me rather less

and sort of didn't constrict my Adam's apple all day.

It wasn't nice to wear but in a rather softer way,

they'd changed the process of the corset into a silicone

which was lighter and not exactly breathable

but it was more pleasant than

the thick rubber thing that I had on before.

So all the time, people were making little adjustments

for my safety and welfare and I'm very grateful.

And you have a special standby painter

who would come and dorb the costume

just to take the shine off it.

The camera department had another trick, they go,

Hold your breath, Tones

and [blowing]

like hairspray in the face, but it was dulling spray

'cause you don't want that costume to be too shiny

because it reflects everything.

Here I was, magnificent in shine.

Eventually, I would be at ILM

and see somebody watching frame by frame by frame

every moment that I made

and in Photoshop, replacing the green with gold.

Oh, my dear friend, how I've missed you.

How amazing that I had thought that after Episode Six,

that was it.

Return of the Jedi, end.

No, we had the prequels

and it worked for us all.

One, two, three,

four, five, six, that was it.

Wrong.

Hopelessly wrong.

Because of course, the phones call,

would I care to work with J.J. Abrams?

He asked me, Would you just like to do the voice?

and I said No, but I would like a new suit.

Of course.

That's J.J.

Goodness, Han Solo!

It is I, C-3PO!

David Merryweather, a total genius

in the special effects arts department,

constrided a suit for photographs

and any material he could get,

anything I could help him with,

and he came out with the whole suit exploded

on his computer, I was, miraculous, absolutely miraculous.

A lot of it was the same.

New material for the middle piece, for the

pants section,

the amazing thing he did was to

insert some pieces here and here

that stopped me being snapped by the,

the meeting of these two joints

but the big thing, this half hour [clicking]

screw here, screw here

became a back, a [clicks] and a [clicks]

[clicks]

After all these years, magic.

After each shot, take it off.

[panting]

Put it back on.

[clicking]

Take it off.

[clicks]

Transformed my life filming.

Adored working on that film.

Adored it apart from

one

argument.

Right at the beginning with the director, with J.J.

You probably don't recognize me because of the red arm.

Look who it is!

Did you see who...

Oh!

What's with the red arm?

It shows some history.

You mean like the silver shin

in the first film, A New Hope?

Yeah, exactly.

But that was too subtle to notice.

Exactly, that's why it's red.

[laughs]

I did not like the red arm, okay?

I thought it was too big, too overt, too clumsy a gesture

so every day on the set, I would say to J.J.,

No forgiveness, ever.

He would laugh.

Sorry.

Come along BB-8, quickly.

[beeping]

Yes, I must get my proper arm reinstalled.

I so persecuted J.J. on the set

of The Force Awakens about the red arm.

I gave him no order at all.

And we finished and that was it and

then I go to see the premiere

and I'm looking at this shot,

yeah, there's the Falcon now rising through special effects

and there is 3PO, waving at the Falcon

with a gold arm.

J.J. had given me a final gift. [laughs]

He changed the color in post production.

3PO's got a gold arm there. [laughs]

For The Force Awakens and indeed, for The Last Jedi,

3PO was 3D printed

and of course, it makes it easier to prototype

because it's all on a computer and you go,

mm, it's not quite right, et cetera.

That was fine, still weighed a surprising amount, actually.

But the pants section was made of a different material,

a kind of new material

that was fine and it was paintable and it moved.

Gradually, it stiffened up,

the material didn't react well with the atmosphere

but gradually, as we got towards the end of filming,

I was realizing how difficult this was

and there was nothing I could do about it,

try to fudge it, try to trick

so you don't notice it so much.

Course, you will now, won't you?

I shouldn't have said anything, jeez.

[laser fires]

[dramatic music]

Part of the wonder of 3PO's look when he's that bright gold

is that he doesn't start off that way at all,

he starts off with just

an ordinary plastic-y looking thing,

white in this case.

But then the vacuum plate, a silver finish onto it,

so you put it in a vacuum chamber with silver foil

and it sticks to it.

But then the clever thing, so you've got a silver droid.

So then the paint department, the art department,

take various colored lacquers

that cover the silver but make it gold

and the silver gives it lift and life and brightness

and you need that, if you started with solid gold,

it kind of would be a little dead

so they thought this out and he looked magnificent,

once the red arm had gone, of course.

Scarif?

They're going to Scarif?

Why does nobody ever tell me anything, R2?

[beeping]

What joy to be asked to be in Rogue One as 3PO.

In just one scene, walk through like Alfred Hitchcock.

Who was that droid?

Yes, I was there.

It was the same suit, of course.

But it just shone out of that very dark and forbidding set

and there was 3PO and I did a little trick.

I got fully dressed in my little tent, my E-Z UP tent,

and when I was ready, they opened the entrance

and I walked out, nobody knew I was gonna be there,

it was a huge secret that 3PO was in this shot.

It was a really good moment

but it was soon over.

Well, I'm quite certain I would remember

if I had a best friend.

And so we come to The Rise of Skywalker.

What it's all been about,

where we were heading.

And here was 3PO again, minus the red arm.

J.J. was indeed forgiven.

What a brilliant film.

I wholeheartedly agree.

But there were issues with the suit.

Still, the [clicks] fixing was great, the arms,

the hands, for the first time, they made hands

that actually were jointed like my own fingers.

This is brilliant, it meant that if I

wanted to pick something up, [clicks] I could do.

And that was so good in the first sequence,

in the sand tunnels with the dagger.

[clicks]

Oh, it's one of those.

Oh, the locations of the Wayfinder

has been inscribed upon this dagger.

I cannot tell you what it felt like,

it was total freedom.

Back in the day, it would be,

sorry, you know, I would've dropped it.

Here, I was clutching it, looking at it.

There were other changes that were not so good.

By now, the section that we know what we call it,

that material really had stiffened up.

It was like wearing concrete underpants.

I had a wonderful part in that film,

I adored being in it

but I had a lot of movement to do,

a lot of running about, a lot of strange terrain.

[Finn] Do not want to know what made these tunnels.

Judging by the circumference of the tunnel walls,

there are-- I said I do not

want to know.

And so gradually, towards the end when it became

almost impossible to move in that middle section,

we found ways round it.

Thank goodness for ILM because

we were able to do all sorts of sequences

that I couldn't do wearing the full middle of the suit

and indeed, when I was climbing

up to Ochi's freighter, up that rock face,

that was me but I was wearing only the,

as it were, girdle part of the middle section.

The rest of me, from there down,

was covered in red dots

and for other sequences, it was the same,

when something was impossible,

we took away that bit of the costume,

stuck red dots down my legs as reference for ILM

and they drew in 3PO's missing limbs.

Absolute magic.

First day on The Rise of Skywalker,

it was awful. [laughs]

I was delighted to be there with the crew

and Daisy and Oscar and John and, of course, J.J.

But boy, what a set.

Because the sand tunnels was a very enclosed set,

it had to be, it was a tunnel, a tube

and it was very hot.

It was hot because we had lamps in there

and also, there was atmosphere,

a bit of smoke to make the lighting look really cool,

as opposed to the hotness that it was.

And it was real perspiration time

and one of the magic things they done

was to give me a little vest, very thin material,

but onto it was sewn fine plastic tubes,

little thin plastic tubes that circled,

like an underfloor heating system,

except it wasn't a heating system,

it was the cooling system.

And what happened at the end of a take

was they would attach me to a black bag, very smart,

but in it was water with lumps of ice

and in the bag, onto a tube, was a circulating fan

so it would shoot water up the tubes,

down the tubes, up the tubes,

all around my chest and back.

It was fantastic, it was immediate.

It felt like a heart attack, it was really weird.

But it did keep me cool

but I could only take it for so long,

Yeah, I'm cool now.

I'm cool, totally cool.

Disconnect me. [laughs]

[Poe] Babu?

Yep, droid is ready.

[electrical bang]

For sitting there in that terrifying scene

with the red eyes,

sitting down in that costume is not possible

so we went for the full bikini section of that,

yes, I was wearing this amazing codpiece,

the rest of the suit was cut away so I could sit down.

And you don't see it,

you don't expect to see it, you don't see it.

Maybe if you can freeze-frame and come in,

zoom in if you're that serious about it,

you'll see the difference

but of course, we also had the red eyes.

When I first looked in a mirror

at me, 3PO, with red eyes,

I got to tell you, it was quite shocking.

'Cause he'd never been like that before.

We had eyes of different

intensities.

Sometimes, they were actually operated by radio

from the electric system over here.

That if I was in very bright light, ambient light,

then they would need to make the eyes bright,

so they were show up.

If it was in a gloomy cave, for instance,

they would dim the lights so they weren't too piercing.

So all the time, you've got a crew behind me

adding to 3PO's value as a character.

Quite amazing.

But the teamwork that goes into making bits of 3PO work

on the whole for the better,

can I actually take this moment to say, thank you guys.

Thank you, all of you.

Did we lose 'em?

Looks like it.

Excellent job, sir!

[laser fires]

Terrible job, sir!

I love remembering how Tracey Eddon

played C-3PO falling off Jabba's barge

and then how she played Princess Leia

sweeping across to the little skiff over there and

stunt people actually are undervalued, frankly.

I wanted there to be an Academy Award for them

but it hasn't happened yet.

Films like the ones we're talking about

really depend on the stunt people so many time,

time after time.

So I was

very, very glad to have a stunt person of my own.

Michael Byrch, he was my stunt double.

But when we were talking about the

wonderful speeder sequence in Jordan,

in Pasaana, the desert,

magic.

There were sequences that were shot

on very fast running vehicles

and Mike was there being 3PO in the distance

running at so many miles an hour

and in case the car crashed,

he was not allowed to be roped on,

he had to have the ability to free fall off the vehicle.

Can you imagine standing upright in a crazy rubber suit

in the wind and the heat and everything

at so many miles an hour

wondering if you're gonna die?

Whereas I, when I was on the real rig,

which was like this wonderful fairground ride

that kind of shot us around,

it was just, it was brilliant fun.

But there I was, wired on to various bits of the scenery,

so that with a certain latitude,

I couldn't go further than that

so I was totally safe.

I had the best time ever.

What are you doing there, 3PO?

Taking one last look, sir,

at my friends.

There we are, thanks for listening to me

talking about C-3PO, not so much today as a character

but as a costume and of course,

as such, I'm the actor who wears

something that's been created and maintained

and fixed and fiddled with and cared for and loved

by a whole team of people

who have made this character look so good

and so convincing in all the Star Wars films

and both I and 3PO are saying,

really guys and gals,

thank you.