Movies - TV
Playing Star Wars' C-3PO Left Actor Anthony Daniels With Permanent Scars
BY MICHAEL BOYLE
While the first “Star Wars” film was a major hit, it had a threadbare budget, which forced C-3PO actor Anthony Daniels to be stuck inside a deeply uncomfortable robot suit. Combine this with the fact that most of C-3PO's scenes were filmed in the hot desert, and Daniels' experience sounded truly miserable.
Daniels told Rolling Stone in a 1980 interview, “It was the metal pieces of the suit shoving me about, meeting with another piece of metal to pinch me horribly. It was like sticking your fingers in an electric socket, again and again.” The actor even unbuttoned his shirt to reveal what Rolling Stone described as “a gruesome network of old wounds” from the suit.
Luckily, things got easier for Daniels with “The Empire Strikes Back,” since the costume was redesigned to be, in the actor’s words, “slightly more flexible.” In the prequels, the C-3PO suit was often replaced with CGI, but the sequels returned to more practical effects with an even more comfortable suit as a bonus.