Alan Tudyk First Auditioned for 'Rogue One' From Nathan Fillion's House

With its darker, grittier tone, the newest Star Wars movie, Rogue One, doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for humor. After all, these are serious times for the rebellion, and if they have any hope at defeating the Empire, they’ll need to find a way to take out its newest weapon, the Death Star. This is why Alan Tudyk’s K-2SO stands out from the pack, as the new droid adds an immense amount of scene-stealing humor with his dry wit and carefree attitude.

When we spoke to Tudyk ahead of Rogue One’s release, not only did he reveal to us that a “surprising amount” of his lines in the film were improvised (see video below), but that his very first “audition” for Rogue One took place via Skype while he was hanging out at Nathan Fillion’s house.

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“I just got a call that Gareth [Edwards] wanted to talk to me, and so we had a Skype session — I was at my buddy’s house, I didn’t really take it that seriously,” he said. “I was over at Nathan Fillion’s house, and I was like ‘Can I use your iPad — I gotta go do this thing?’ So I called [Gareth] on Nathan’s iPad and just had a conversation about being a robot in a movie, and to be motion capture. I thought the conversation was because I had done I, Robot, but it was more than that for him. Then he asked me to formally audition, and I recorded it with my wife at home — it was all real relaxed.”

Tudyk went on to describe the audition he was asked to put on tape, and it was a scene that wasn’t in the movie, but a very cool one nonetheless. With films like Rogue One that have a lot of secrecy around them, usually the scenes actors audition with aren’t in the film, but, as Tudyk explains, “they have elements within them that will inform them as to whether or not you’re right for the role.”

So what was this scene? 

“It was a scene where they were all landing on a planet that had a magnetic field that scrambled K-2SO’s circuits. And so he slowly became drunker — first he goes really fast, then he slows down, then he makes the wrong calculations — and then says, ‘I can fly it — give me the keys!'”

Tudyk said that after he sent it in, Edwards asked to meet with him and just offered him the role right on the spot. “No other movie is done like that,” Tudyk said. “They gave him power to cast who he wanted to, and usually it’s a whole tier of people who weigh in. For this, it was much more in the hands of the artist, and he put together such a cool group.”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is now in theaters.

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