At the end of the hour that I spend with the actor Anthony Daniels, he reaches unprompted into his bag and removes a severed head. The pale gold exterior is tarnished and distressed. The static dots of its pupils stare out from behind tiny grilles. The mouth, an oblong slit like a tiny letterbox, conveys alarm. It is, unmistakably, C-3PO, the finicky, worrywart droid whom Daniels has played in all six Star Wars films, and plays again in the latest instalment, The Force Awakens, which is due out in December.
Fans’ expectations for the new film are stratospheric for several reasons. The role of director has passed from George Lucas to JJ Abrams, who made a decent fist of the Star Trek reboot. “George has changed a lot over the years but I think he finds it slightly hard to collaborate,” Daniels observes. “He made decisions that I believe might have been better discussed with other people. JJ is more collaborative. He likes to listen.” Then there is the reunion of key original cast members including Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. The fantasy is that the new movie will somehow be good enough to override memories of the three previous instalments. (The title of one, The Phantom Menace, has acquired the voodoo power of the word “Macbeth”.)
“Ah, the prequels,” says Daniels ruefully. “Hmm. I turned one on the other night. Sky seems to have devoted a whole channel to them.” He leaves no doubt that this is a risible state of affairs. But then he has never been shy of nibbling, if not biting, the hand that feeds him. He gives a shudder when mentioning the Ewoks, the teddy-bear tribe from Return of the Jedi, and claims to have been unimpressed by the lurch in the prequels toward fully digital sets. “The effects are clever but pointless. The skill is there, but so what? Coldness, that’s the word. Bleakness, even.”
All the signs are that The Force Awakens will be different. “It became clear early on that with JJ we were getting back to the old-fashioned kind of film-making. We have walls. Actual sets! All right, so you might not have a view out of the window, but you have a window. Now, what else can I tell you?” He mulls something over, then says: “No, I can’t tell you that.”
We are in the office of DK Books, which is publishing an exhaustive new Star Wars encyclopaedia to which Daniels has contributed the foreword. An editor is sitting with us to ensure that we don’t stray too far on to the subject of The Force Awakens. Daniels is a model of discretion, even when he emails me later to say how Abrams has approached C-3PO’s place in the new movie: “While meticulously directing every moment of Episode VII, and giving 3PO time and space to do his thing, JJ is far too respectful to suggest that he change the droid’s ways in any way. There was, however, some debate about a certain issue, whose outcome will become apparent in due course …”
Daniels seems mildly indignant at the extent to which he has been monitored by Disney, now the home of the Star Wars franchise. As well he might. He didn’t just step off the first space-cruiser from Mos Eisley: he is 69 years old and has been playing C-3PO since before many of his current paymasters were born. “The secrecy has been beyond ludicrous,” he sighs. “For heaven’s sake, it’s a movie. When I got the script, it was typed in black on paper of the deepest red so you couldn’t photocopy it. I got a hangover just reading it.” He was censured by the studio recently for mentioning on Twitter a fellow actor from The Force Awakens.
“I said that I’d met so-and-so. An actor who plays a … thing in the film. A character. Immediately I received a message from Disney: ‘Remove the tweet! You’re not allowed to say that!’ Honestly. It’s a kind of Kremlin attitude. Look, I know perfectly well not to tell you now what I’m giving you for a Christmas present because it would spoil the surprise. And these films are all about opening the box on Christmas Day.”
The contrast with 1977, when Star Wars opened almost without fanfare, is striking. “There was none of this paranoia because it was a daft little film and no one cared.” It was also his movie debut. Prior to that, he had been a stage and radio performer for several years after abandoning his law degree to study acting. When I suggest that he can’t have imagined back then that his face would be concealed for much of his career, he puts me straight: “ I had no expectations whatsoever. I just wanted to act.” (Interestingly, he tells me he suffers from mild prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces. Ironic given how he makes a living. “I could see you in the street in 10 minutes and not remember you. I’m thinking of taking part in a study.”)
He was certain, though, that he didn’t want to play C-3PO. “I was so negative about it. Why would I want to be involved with this rubbish?” Still, he met Lucas at the 20th Century Fox offices in London and it was there that he saw Ralph McQuarrie’s painting of C-3PO. “The droid had a kind of bleak, forlorn emptiness. I felt as though he were asking me to come and help – to be his companion.” Daniels refers often to that sense of kinship. When I email him a week later with more questions, he is in Las Vegas, where he is promoting a Star Wars computer game. It is 2am and he is having trouble sleeping. I ask what the best thing is about playing C-3PO and he replies: “Accepting praise on his behalf. Being his closest friend.”
Daniels spent six months with Lucas’s script while the costume was being made. The stiff, uncomfortable suit took two hours to get on or off. The head alone couldn’t be removed in less than 30 minutes. (These days, that has been reduced to a more manageable eight seconds.) “The screenplay was very good as far as C-3PO was concerned, but I had no idea what was going on in the rest of it. Still don’t. When JJ told me the story of the new one, my eyes sort of glazed over.” The character was already written as a pernickety fussbudget but Daniels tuned into his damaged quality also. “Look at his lines. ‘I’ve got to rest before I fall apart …’ ‘It’s our lot in life …’ And my favourite: ‘We’re doomed!’ He spends the whole time thinking he’s in peril. He’s had enough. He’s been abused. He’s traumatised.”
It’s disorienting to hear C-3PO’s voice, which is higher and reedier than Daniels’ own, emerging from the lips of this gentle white-haired man in jeans and a checked shirt. “People tell me I look like him,” he says, giving a “what-can-you-do?” shrug.
Perhaps some sort of symbiosis has occurred. I’m not saying that Daniels and C-3PO behave identically. But it is hard to imagine that the droid would have reacted to the sight of mud on the carpet any differently than the actor did upon first entering the room: “Oh dear. Look at that. You’ll need to fetch some sticky tape to get rid of it …”
Daniels was never meant to supply the character’s voice, though Lucas didn’t get around to telling him that. On his first day on set in Tunisia – “The suit had already broken, I was hot and in pain” – he had trouble with his lines, and was reassured by the director that it could all be fixed in post-production. It was only when Daniels arrived in Los Angeles much later for the dubbing session (“Did you ever wonder why C-3PO sounds like he has severe jetlag?”) that he learned from the engineers that they had been auditioning other contenders for months.
He excuses Lucas for failing to tell him. “He was under so much pressure. Everything was going wrong. The weather, the droids breaking down, no one having done anything like this before …” Daniels refers to Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, as his “saviour”. “He assured me that ‘films are not normally like this’. His professionalism was an inspiration to keep going on a job that I was slightly regretting.”
Even once Star Wars became an unexpected hit, Daniels’s woes were not over. Keen for audiences to believe in C-3PO as an actual droid, the studio sidelined him from promotional duties. “I had sold my identity on the grounds that someone would be watching. Millions were. But they were never allowed to know they were in part watching me.” Given this shoddy treatment, I ask why he signed up to the 1980 sequel, The Empire Strikes Back.
“I had become fond of C-3PO and couldn’t just abandon him. I think I felt responsible for him. And it was an acting job.”
That job has become his life. With rare exceptions (he did voice work on the 1978 animated Lord of the Rings, and turned up in human form on Prime Suspect), he need never ask “What’s the character like?” when his agent calls about a new script. Whether it’s animation (The Clone Wars) or a computer game (Lego Star Wars), the character will always be C-3PO. And, when it isn’t, it will be Star Wars-related, such as the Star Wars: In Concert shows he has narrated at venues including the O2 and the Hollywood Bowl.
People approach him regularly to thank him for their childhood. “I always feel like saying: ‘I’m sure there were other things in it.’ They want to repay you. JJ was 11 when he saw Star Wars and he is still besotted.” Daniels will be C-3PO for at least two more films: the eighth Star Wars movie begins shooting next January, the ninth in 2018. Does it ever get too much? “Sometimes I hear myself and think: ‘Oh, shut up.’ I recorded a C-3PO satnav and they gave me one to keep. I was driving in France with it. My voice was saying to me ‘At the next roundabout, take the fifth exit …’ and do you know what? I really started to get on my nerves. It was weird because I didn’t know where I was driving. And yet, this other ‘me’ did. It was beyond surreal.”
He stresses that he does have a life that doesn’t involve Star Wars. He lives in London with his wife; they also have a house in France with a “difficult” garden. (“You’d be amazed. I bought a chainsaw the other day.”) I wonder, though, if his C-3PO duties leave much time for anything else. “I don’t think I’m very good at other things,” he says matter-of-factly. “I wanted to act but I didn’t want to play Hamlet. With Star Wars, my life jolted sideways. I look at other actors now – they’re all terribly good – and I think, ‘How do you know how to do that? How?’ Because I seem to have forgotten.”
Ultimate Star Wars is published by DK Books. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is released 18 December.
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