With the first season of Star Wars: Andor in the can and the second currently filming here in the UK, Tony Gilroy caught up with Dan Brooks from the official site to discuss the season, the challenges of filming the show, what made it so indelibly unique and also touched upon a new addition to the droid family, B2EMO and the human behind him Dave Chapman.
B2EMO, the box-shaped Andor family droid, is charmingly fussy and insecure, but he’s getting up there in years. As such, B2 needs to charge in order to lie and speaks with a stutter. Fans loved him.
“The idea was that it was a dog,” Gilroy says. “An older dog.” He credits creature effects supervisor Neal Scanlan and the creature department with developing a design quickly, noting that they only looked at a few drawings before picking what would become B2. When Gilroy and his collaborators saw the protype at Pinewood Studios, it was love at first sight. “We were all smiling,” he says.
On-set, veteran Star Wars puppeteer Dave Chapman operated B2 and performed the voice. The plan always was to cast an actor and rerecord the droid’s dialogue, but things changed.
“I remember having a list of audition pieces and watching a bunch of them. My brother John was over there one day, and he goes, ‘I’m not hearing anything here I like as much as [Dave].’ He goes, ‘This guy’s really good.’ And we went back and were like, ‘Man, let’s just keep him.’ So that’s his voice, and that was a great phone call to make — to call him up and go, ‘It’s yours. You’re gonna be the voice of this thing.’”
According to Gilroy, Chapman — accustomed to having his voice removed from movies and shows — was “overwhelmed.”
You can read my 2-part interview with Dave Chapman and fellow BB-8 operator Brian Herring in Star Wars Insider #197 and #198 and fingers crossed we’ll be catching up with Dave soon to talk all things B2EMO.
- Hardcover Book
- Horton, Cole (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 160 Pages - 03/21/2023 (Publication Date) - Insight Editions (Publisher)
