Alan Tudyk can’t stop playing robots. In just this calendar year alone, the actor portrayed Robot #5, aka Gary, in Superman and reprised his beloved role of K2SO in Andor. He’s very used to providing voices and motion capture for these kinds of roles. The man is a pro. After all, he’s played robots on screen for over 20 years. That’s right, did you know Tudyk provided the performance capture and voice for Sonny, the titular NS5 automaton in the 2004 sci-fi hit I, Robot? If you didn’t know, there’s a pretty good reason for that: Will Smith assured you didn’t.
20th Century Fox
On a recent episode of the podcast Toon’d In with Jim Cummings, Tudyk explained that during test screenings for the Alex Proyas-directed movie, he actually scored way higher than star Will Smith. Because of that, Tudyk says, he was cut out of all marketing and press ahead of the movie’s release. Below is his quote, which we saw in Variety.
“A lot of people did not know I did Sonny the Robot in I, Robot, and there is a reason,” Tudyk said. “They were doing test audiences for the movie, and they score the characters in this kind of test screening. I got word back: ‘Alan, you are testing higher than Will Smith.’ And then I was gone. I was done. There was no publicity, and my name was not mentioned.”
“I was so shocked,” he continued. “I was like, ‘Wait, nobody is going to know I’m in it!’ I put a lot into [that performance]. I had to move like a robot. At the time, I was very upset.”
Upstaging the star, especially in a non-face role, was kind of a no-go in 2004. With the exception of Andy Serkis’ Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, who was actually singled out in a lot of the marketing, those kinds of roles didn’t receive recognition in those days.
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We obviously only have Tudyk’s version of events here, but having seen I, Robot myself, I’m not surprised. Sonny is far and away the best character in the movie. Sympathetic and compelling, the plight of a robot charged with murder makes him inherently likeable. Contrast that with Smith’s technophobic, “old school” Detective Del Spooner who is just kind of a grump. It’s no question who audiences would root for more.
At least nowadays both performance capture and Tudyk specifically get the recognition they deserve.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
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