Alan Tudyk received his first Emmy nomination for Best Voiceover Performance for Andor season two, and he recently spoke to GoldDerby.com about creating the character of K-2SO in Rogue One, learning from C-3PO, and coming full circle with the KX-series security droid.
Gold Derby: We get to see K-2SO in his Imperial enforcer days in Andor. What was it like to play that version of the character for the first time?
Alan Tudyk: K-2SO is such a funny guy in Rogue One, so it’s wild to see the reverse side of him here. And it’s amazing to see what a destructive force he was! Those enforcer droids are intimidating and freaky; they throw people around and are just killers and marauders. There’s one moment in the show where you see a room that’s filled with them and you just think: “Oh, this is bad.”
Did you get to have any input in terms of how K-2SO fights?
No, but I did get to talk to Tony before we started the show about his dialogue in some of the scenes. K-2’s humor is tricky, because he can become C-3PO really easily — you know, this kind of uptight guy. So I got to tweak a few of the lines. The tweak that I enjoyed the most was when I’m walking across a bridge and this security guard goes, “Are you with us?” I had a long line there originally and it didn’t make sense to me that K-2 would say it. So instead I just say “No” and then knock the guard off the bridge!
That’s a very Indiana Jones-esque way to shorten an action scene.
Exactly! I wish that K-2 had a whip. [Laughs]
You mentioned C-3PO earlier — how did you want to ensure that K-2 would be distinct from Anthony Daniels when you originated the part in Rogue One?
When I started out, I wrestled with how much I could express emotionally as the character since he’s a robot. So I did look to Anthony Daniels and realized that he gives you so much permission [for emotion] in his performance as C-3PO. It was very clear to me that K-2 saw Cassian as the one authority he would listen to — it was sort of a big brother-little brother kind of relationship.
I remember there was one scene that didn’t make it into Rogue One where some Rebel soldier says, “Droid, take these crates and put them over there,” and K-2 goes, “No,” and walks away. We played around a lot like that on the Rogue One set in terms of K-2’s level of emotion, because when you’re a CG character you can pretty much say whatever you want! The filmmakers can change it at anytime.
It’s funny, I was watching Rogue One again recently and I realized that I mostly remembered the lines that I had said on set, not the ones they used in the movie. There’s a scene with Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones) where I remembered saying something like: “No one likes you. Everyone talks about you when you’re not in the room and they stop when you come in. Then when you leave, they start talking about you again.” But he doesn’t say that in the movie; I just remembered all the sassier lines that we came up with on set. [Laughs]
I do appreciate that K-2 still talks with a British accent, continuing that tradition of Imperial officers all hailing from the U.K.
Yeah, that was something that I always liked as a kid watching Star Wars. It imprinted on me, and I was glad that Gareth wanted that as well. I actually gave him three versions of the voice: the first was an American accent, which sounded awful. And then I did a Mid-Atlantic, very theater way of speaking, which didn’t sound good either. When I did the English version, he was immediately like, “Yeah, do that one.” [Laughs]
We hear K-2 refer to his Imperial past at various points in Andor — he mentions that he remembers seeing Emperor Palpatine on Coruscant, for example. In your mind, how do those memories of his former self clash with who he is now?
I thought of them as memories that are just as distant for him as they can be for humans. They may have been hurtful or upsetting in the moment, but decades later they are just events. Although I do think his reaction to Palpatine is right on the money. There’s always a pang of importance to the emperor.
Do you think he regrets any of his actions? Is regret even an emotion a droid can process?
I think that idea would’ve been great to go to play with. There are a lot of stories we didn’t get to tell in Andor, especially in terms of how K-2 bonds with Cassian. Because I do think there’s some bonding that happens off-screen between the two of them where Cassian really finds the right balance with K-2, who probably has some kind of awful PTSD and needs to have somebody tell him, “This is who you are now.” I would have loved to have depicted that, because they’re truly bonded by the time we see them in Rogue One. Maybe we’ll get ILM onboard to do it now! You can write it, and we’ll shoot it. [Laughs]
Read the interview in full here, and stream Andor on Disney+ now.
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