It was still dark when Anthony Daniels arrived for his first morning of filming Star Wars: A New Hope in 1976. The production had set up in the Sahara Desert in Tunisia, which could be both freezing cold and blisteringly hot. Daniels, a British actor and mime artist, had been cast as the fussbudget droid C-3PO, a role he would eventually play in nine films. It required him to be installed into an elaborate gold-plated suit. On that first morning, it sat in 17 pieces in a tent in the desert. It took two hours for him to get into the costume.
"I lost my entire body, my sense of being me," Daniels told a packed audience at the BMO Centre Friday afternoon as part of Calgary Expo. "People struggled to put the whole thing together. It was utterly, utterly painful and awful. So this is when you tell me how wonderful I am and how important I am to your childhood. Because I suffered for my art."
A Running Theme of Suffering and Humor
It was a running theme on Friday for the 80-year-old actor, who spent much of his 45-minute talk roaming through the audience in front of the main stage in the Champion Ballroom. He made several references to his 2019 memoir I Am C-3PO and noted that he was the only actor to appear in all nine films in the main Skywalker canon of the Star Wars universe, from A New Hope to 2019's The Rise of Skywalker.
The talk began with Daniels narrating his own introductory film, which showed numerous clips of C-3PO in harrowing situations that heightened the droid's anxiety levels. The voice Daniels created for C-3PO was meant to reflect the character being constantly tense, misunderstood, and maltreated, he said.
Yes, Star Wars was about the Force and the battle between rebels and the evil empire and a very dysfunctional family. But, according to Daniels, "Star Wars is the story about a gold robot who was bullied and humiliated for all nine movies!" he exclaimed.
Behind-the-Scenes Stories
Daniels shared some behind-the-scenes tidbits, although there is probably not much that hasn't already been revealed over the years. He talked about working with Sir Alec Guinness, who had to be coaxed into taking on the role of Jedi mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi. The fact that the legendary actor was not sold on director George Lucas' vision is old news, but it is still amusing to hear Daniels tell the story while adopting a spot-on imitation of the actor.
"Nobody understood what George Lucas was talking about," he said. "The British crew had never made a film like this and there were all sorts of tensions. One day Sir Alec said to me, 'You will be in other films, and you will find them better than this.'"
Nearly Walking Away
Daniels, who was at the same agency as Guinness, also was not sold on the idea when his management told him to try out for the part. In fact, Lucas seemed rather passive and less than enthusiastic when he gave Daniels the role and initially planned to get another actor to voice C-3PO. When Star Wars exploded and became one of the biggest cultural phenomena in film history, Daniels was left out of the public eye because producers wanted to maintain the illusion that C-3PO was a real robot. The actor felt so rejected by this that he initially decided he would not return for the first sequel, 1980's The Empire Strikes Back.
"At the end of the film I was given no credit, I wasn't allowed to be a part of the whole circus, I didn't exist," he said. "That hurt more than I could possibly tell you. So I nearly didn't do (Empire Strikes Back). Then I thought about it and I realized two things. First of all, it was a job and I was an actor, once. It was also returning to a character of which I'm very fond."
Calgary Expo continues until Sunday at Stampede Park.
