Alan Tudyk has made a fine career of playing otherworldly roles. Sometimes he’s a robot, like in Rogue One or Superman. Other times he’s an alien, like on Resident Alien, or he lends his voice to all manner of weird, wacky creatures from Moana and Encanto to Big Hero 6 and Wreck-It Ralph. Long before any of that, though, Tudyk played Sonny, the lead robot in the 2004 Will Smith hit I, Robot—but there’s a good chance you didn’t know that.
That’s because it wasn’t well publicized. Speaking on the “Toon’d In with Jim Cummings” podcast, Tudyk explained that after a test screening for the film, the audiences gave his character, Sonny, a higher score than Will Smith’s character, Del. Once that happened, he mysteriously found himself no longer part of the film’s massive press tour. “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,” Tudyk continued. “I was like, ‘Wait, nobody is going to know I’m in it!’ I put a lot into [my performance]. I had to move like a robot. At the time, I was very upset.” And who can blame him? He’s basically the second lead in that movie and working in a medium, performance capture, that was still in its early stages. This is just a few years after Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. Tudyk would later become more synonymous with the technology thanks to a few of his later roles, but this is a big one for which he didn’t get the credit he deserved.
Smith hasn’t come out to discuss Tudyk’s revelations and likely won’t. But there is plenty of precedent of huge stars not liking to share the spotlight, so you get the sense that happened here. You can watch the clip starting at about 17:22 below.
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