C-3PO

• 1. Introduction

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  C-3PO's golden face traces back to a silent film made in 1927, fifty years before Star Wars reached theatres. Ralph McQuarrie, the concept artist for Star Wars, modeled the initial design on the female robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. When actor Anthony Daniels saw one of McQuarrie's paintings, he was struck by a quality he hadn't expected: vulnerability. That reaction set in motion a commitment lasting across all nine films of the Skywalker Saga. The droid Daniels came to embody is a protocol model, built for etiquette and translation and fluent in over six million forms of communication. What the films keep returning to is stranger: how do you follow the story of a machine whose memory can be wiped?

• 2. Inside the Golden Suit

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  The first C-3PO costume took two hours to put on and thirty minutes just to remove the head. In his memoir I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story, Anthony Daniels describes it as claustrophobic and painful. The suit barely moved, cracked easily, and had no ventilation. Daniels overheated inside it, scraped himself repeatedly, and could barely see where he was walking.

  When Star Wars became an enormous success, publicists tried to suggest that C-3PO was a real robot rather than an actor in a costume. Daniels felt his acting was being undervalued. He was hesitant to return for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and agreed to do so only after negotiating a higher salary.

  Daniels would eventually portray C-3PO in ten live-action films, plus the 2008 animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars. For video game appearances, the role has also been taken by Tom Kane and Tony Pope.

• 3. The Voice Debate

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  George Lucas cast Anthony Daniels as the performer inside the costume but was deeply hesitant about giving the character Daniels's British accent. According to Daniels, Lucas wanted C-3PO to sound like a "sleazy New York second-hand car dealer." Roughly thirty well-established actors auditioned for the voice role, among them Richard Dreyfuss and Mel Blanc. Daniels received the part after one of the other auditioning actors suggested the idea to Lucas directly.

  With Daniels also voicing the character, the persona shifted away from what Lucas had envisioned. What might have been oily and mercenary became instead something closer to a neurotic English butler. In a 1977 interview with Rolling Stone, Lucas called the two droids the "comic aspect" of the original film. He added that C-3PO and R2-D2 were designed to resemble the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.

  After The Last Jedi in 2017, Daniels complained publicly that C-3PO had been reduced to a "table decoration." The character, he insisted, is "worth more than that."

• 4. Memory and Identity

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  For George Lucas, the way to generate audience sympathy for C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back was to have him physically dismantled. Lucas even considered having Darth Vader convert the droid into something as mundane as an alarm clock. In the finished film, C-3PO is blasted into pieces by an unseen foe in Cloud City and rescued from a scrap pile by Chewbacca. When the Wookiee reassembles the droid, he puts C-3PO's head on backwards.

  On Endor in Return of the Jedi, the Ewoks release their captives after taking C-3PO for a deity. That same night, C-3PO narrates the full history of the Rebellion's fight against the Empire to the tribe, persuading them to join the cause.

  At the close of Revenge of the Sith in 2005, Captain Raymus Antilles orders C-3PO's memory erased. The purpose is to keep the Skywalker twins safe from their father and from the newly created Galactic Empire.

  In The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, the memory is deliberately erased a second time. On the planet Kijimi, a black-market droid-smith extracts a Sith-language translation from C-3PO. The process deletes everything he carries with him. When he returns to the Resistance camp, R2-D2 restores it.

  C-3PO enters The Force Awakens in 2015 with a red left arm that goes unexplained on screen. By that point, he is fluent in seven million forms of communication.

• 5. The Underdogs

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  Cultural critic Jonathan McIntosh has described C-3PO and R2-D2 as "emotionally relatable underdogs" whom audiences can empathize with. He traces this quality to Akira Kurosawa's 1958 film The Hidden Fortress, which features two bickering peasants dragged through events beyond their control. Like those peasants, McIntosh argues, the droids are simultaneously humorous and tragic.

  Jawas sell C-3PO to Owen Lars on Tatooine in the first film, and that transaction sets the terms for everything that follows. C-3PO is owned, traded, dismantled, and ordered about by almost every major character across the saga. McIntosh describes both droids as members of an oppressed underclass of exploited laborers, a reading the saga's plot consistently supports.

  In 1978, C-3PO appeared in the Star Wars Holiday Special. By 1980, the character had crossed into mainstream television with appearances on both The Muppet Show and Sesame Street. Daniels and the writer Ryder Windham co-wrote a 1997 one-shot comic titled The Protocol Offensive. The same actor who spent decades inside the golden suit also helped shape C-3PO's story on the page.