Phoebe Waller-Bridge should be a well-known name by this point considering her award-winning track record with Fleabag, appearances on Broadchurch, and the success of Killing Eve. It’s a good time for the playwright/actress and it is about to get better with the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story on Memorial Day weekend. While she isn’t in the film in the flesh, she does play the memorable role of droid L3-37 at the side of Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian. According to the early reactions for the film, Waller-Bridge is a standout as the droid and one of the joys of the film. It just doesn’t correlate to her actual knowledge about Star Wars.
I am not sure if it’s safe to say a lot of folks haven’t seen any of the Star Wars, but Phoebe Waller-Bridge hasn’t. She admitted as much on The Graham Norton Show this week and added that she had no idea that the character she’d be auditioning for was a robot:
“I was going to the audition, and I thought, ‘This character’s amazing, she’s a revolutionary, she’s really cool, and the dialogue was amazing.’ But it kind of said just in one of the stage directions, ‘droid.’ So I was like, ‘droid, droid…And then I googled ‘droid,’ and then nothing much came up, weirdly, just pictures. It wasn’t explicitly that it’s a robot.”
She adds that she even asked the taxi driver what a droid was on the way and he wasn’t much help. So she just auditioned as a human being, and it seemed to work — though they did ask her to do it more like a droid and someone gave it away, turning on a lightbulb in the playwright’s head. As she says, they decided to play it more human-like in the end, and everything was hunky dory.
Also, I am not sure if we’ll ever get an R-rated Star Wars film, but I think it’d be fun to bring her droid character back and let her curse a bit. Just go at it.
(Via Graham Norton / Indiewire)