Droid-hood: Inside C-3PO

Anthony Daniels's ambivalent life as C-3PO.

- Boris Kachka

"There was no way I was going to just do the voice. 3PO is an integration—look at the light on that tree!” says Anthony Daniels, the only actor who’s appeared in every Star Wars movie, tromping briskly through London’s Regent’s Park on an unseasonably balmy Halloween afternoon. Speaking into the digital recorder he swiped from me at the start of our walk, he recounts his first chat with J.J. Abrams, the director of Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Abrams offered to put another actor inside the stiff and fussy protocol droid known as C-3PO, thus sparing the 69-year-old Daniels a few months in formfitting plastic. Daniels instantly declined. “Now,” he says as crisply as 3PO, “I’m part of the—what is the word?”

Carrie Fisher recently called them “legacy players.” Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Peter “Chewbacca” Mayhew have all returned for the first proper sequel to 1983’s Return of the Jedi. (Forget George Lucas’s prequels; many people would prefer to.) “I keep calling us heritage players,” says Daniels. “I feel more like an heirloom on the mantelpiece than anything.”

Abrams saw Star Wars when he was 11, and he grew up in an age when fandom went from lonely obsession to superhero multiverse. Now he’s gotten to direct its aging stars—action figures come to life. The most loyal among them is a former stage actor who auditioned reluctantly for “some low-budget sci-fi movie” and wound up a golden robot for the rest of his life. Daniels can be a prickly ambassador, publicly tweaking the Ewoks, the suit, the actors, and Lucas himself. But what true fan, Abrams included, hasn’t had a beef with the franchise? Like 3PO and R2-D2,