A Toast To Anthony Daniels, Who Found A Great Gig And Stuck With It

Every actor has a different answer to the question of what the hardest thing is about being an actor. Most of those answers are a diversion from the truth. The hardest thing about being an actor isn’t staying in the moment, or doing accents or voices, or building a character, or any of that. The hardest thing about being an actor is staying regularly employed.

Acting is a job, and given that actors tend to be temporary contractors, regular work is the sort of thing every actor craves. As I write this, I’m backstage between scenes in a play I’m performing - and at a contracted length of four months full-time including rehearsals, it’s a pretty damn good gig. That’s why principal roles in TV shows are highly sought-after: it’s a decent chunk of work to begin with, and if the show gets renewed, it provides work in an ongoing fashion. Unless you’re the kind of megastar who can pick and choose their projects, if you find a good gig, you gotta ride that train as long as you can. You never know how long it'll be between jobs.

That’s part of why I love Anthony Daniels so much. His work as C-3PO in the Star Wars films is exemplary. Through his vocal and physical performance, he turned a servile robot character into a beloved household name. Without C-3PO (or R2-D2), there’s no Star Wars. But the role has also grown into a terrific career - a rarity for a single role, but a rarity that has kept Daniels in work near-continuously for over forty years, the beautiful bastard. Anthony Daniels is the epitome of an actor who found a good gig and stuck the hell with it. 

Few other actors can claim the sheer volume of credits in a single role that Anthony Daniels can. Christopher Lee played Dracula ten times, in films of varying quality. Robert Englund played Freddy Krueger seventeen times, including one-off TV appearances. Samuel L. Jackson has played Nick Fury in eleven films, three video games, and two television series (including the upcoming What If?). In the serial age, Johnny Weissmuller starred in 28 Tarzan films across two separate roles. Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce did Holmes and Watson in 14 films and a radio series. Eddie Constantine played secret agent Lemmy Caution thirteen times. Mickey Rooney played Andy Hardy sixteen times. Arthur Lake and Penny Singleton played Dagwood and Blondie in a whopping 28 films. Bernard Lee played M 11 times, Lois Maxwell played Moneypenny 14 times, and Desmond Llewelyn played Q 17 times. And let’s not even start on daily soap actors, some of whom continue working nonstop in the same role for thousands of individual episodes.

But most of those actors only played their roles in one medium. Star Wars’ multimedia, merch-heavy nature expands Daniels’ appearances exponentially.

Including now ten Star Wars films, Daniels has forty-five IMDb credits to his name as C-3PO - which, due to the nature of IMDb, includes film, TV, and video games, but does not include a slew of radio shows, mobile content, toy voiceovers (!), the Making Of Star Wars documentary, or the infamous Meco Star Wars Christmas album. That’s double his non-C-3PO credits, one of which is even in a Star Wars film (Solo, in which he cameos as “Tak”).There have been periods where Daniels has done other work - generally one-off TV roles, and mostly between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace - but looking at his filmography, the vast majority of his credits read “C-3PO.”

Daniels is synonymous with C-3PO, to the extent that his autobiography is entitled I Am C-3PO, cheekily referring back to Leonard Nimoy’s autobiographies I Am Not Spock and I Am Spock. Hell, his IMDB page lists a further 16 appearances as C-3PO under the “Himself” section. He seems to welcome it, putting on at least a cheerful facade, if not actual cheer, whenever he’s interviewed about it - even when he's clearly exhausted by the rigors of shooting. As far as characters go, C-3PO is a fun one to be associated with: he’s loveable, hilarious, and secretly the heart of the Star Wars saga, fiercely loyal but always just a touch grumpy about it.

The synonymity goes both ways: just as Anthony Daniels owes his career to C-3PO, so too does Threepio owe his likability to Daniels. Originally, George Lucas saw the droid as a “con man” or "used car salesman" type, complete with an American accent. Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs, Daffy, and Porky) was an early favourite for the voice role. But the decidedly more English Daniels won out, possibly thanks to playing against expectations (and thanks also to a recommendation from Blanc). Thank God he did, because Daniels’ prissy, fretful English-accented space-butler is one of the great joys of the Star Wars franchise. Can you even imagine the films without him?

For all the delights found in how he actually plays the role, there’s something almost working-class about Daniels’ devotion to C-3PO that I can’t help but adore. It matches Threepio's position in the Star Wars universe perfectly: he’s there to do his job, whatever that might be and wherever he might be useful. “We seem to be made to suffer; it’s our lot in life,” mourns Threepio in the original Star Wars. Given Daniels’ difficulties acting in his restrictive costume in the Tunisian desert heat, it’s hard not to see that line as a little bit self-referential. The fact that he continued to deal with that costume for forty more years - becoming the only actor to appear in every Star Wars film to date - is a testament to dedication (and a little bit to improvements in costume construction). Gotta keep serving the audience; gotta keep working

Now, in The Rise of Skywalker, Daniels has the best material, and does the best work, that he’s had and done since Return of the Jedi. Depending on your opinion of the movie, he’s either a delightful highlight or one of the few actually-good things in it. So let’s take a minute to appreciate what a gift of a character Anthony Daniels has given us, reliably, for over forty years. Goldenrod, we salute you.