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.”