I have a very close friend who is a brilliant clown, and I always wanted to do a show with him. So I did one year at La MaMa Theatre. I had not done stilts before that show, and I had about two weeks to learn how to do that, and they were just made with off-off Broadway money. The ones that I had in Rogue One were made by [Industrial Light & Magic]. So they were really easy. They were made with actual prosthetic feet on the bottom. They were athletic, in a way. I could run in them. There was a bounce to them that I could use.
Going back was like a reunion for all the cast. We were all there. It was weird to have been away from it for a few months, and then, "Hey look, here we all are. I can still walk on these stilts. Wow, we all still fit in our costumes." It was nice to connect again, and then we went to Star Wars Celebration right after that. It's neat.
Reading is a heady thing. You can be into the action of someone's thoughts and take a whole trip down someone's ruminations while seconds tick by in the world that they're in, but you can't really do that in film. Some films can, but not too much.
I love Diego [ Luna Cassian]. Diego is very funny. He's a very cool guy. I'm looking forward to doing all the press stuff and getting to hang out with him and everybody again.
[Diego Luna Cassian] quite a smartass, and I really appreciate smartasses. He used to make fun of me for the stupid backpack I wore. There were a few situations where I couldn't [wear the stilts]. [When] I was on a cliffside or running in water and stuff like that, I had to wear this backpack with a telescoping head that came off the top, and it was really stupid looking.
It's just like they approach things on every movie I've worked on, very much as if it was a live-action movie. The character you're playing, even though he's a rooster and is really stupid, you approach it in the same way you would approach Hamlet, which is exactly how I approached it. But they give you the circumstances. "You're on the boat. You didn't expect to be here. You just climbed in a boat to maybe sleep. You don't even know why you climbed in the boat. You're really that dumb.
When we recorded [Moana], I would do all of the stuff and then save all the big screaming for last so that you can really blow it out and ratchet it up every time, get that perfect panicked pitch.
I like comedies, and my brain sort of spins in that direction. So I'm really happy to say there were several smartass comments that come from me [on Star Wars].
I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.