Ben Schwartz Says BB-8 Has Actual Dialogue in 'Star Wars: The Force Awakens'
Nearly two months after it was revealed that House of Lies star Ben Schwartz helped give the adorable new droid BB-8 its voice in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the actor can finally talk openly about the surreal experience.
Schwartz, who worked with The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams on the NBC spy drama Undercovers, told Reddit this week that the filmmaker approached him during a Star Wars production lull. Abrams told Schwartz he wanted BB-8 “to have personality,” Schwartz recalled (see the video above). “I want to put him in situations where he can feel warmth and he can be funny, and be all these things,” Abrams explained.
So they got to work, not only giving a voice to the droid, but a full human vocabulary, too.
“We wrote real dialogue for him, there’s recordings of me over scenes,” Schwartz said. “J.J. Abrams would show me scenes and I would say real dialogue as BB-8 in response to whatever Rey or people were saying. And the goal was to give that to Lucasfilm, and they would turn it into beeps and boops.”
That didn’t quite work, as even those beeps and boops sounded a bit too human. So they tried to use a synthesizer to create BB-8’s voice. And while that wasn’t a perfect solution, it was at least useful for the post-production aces at Lucasfilm.
“I was told by the editors that all the dialogue that I did for the film was used while they edited,” he said. “So if Rey was having a scene with BB-8, they would edit with my dialogue in there to help know when to cut to and back and go to the wide and stuff.”
It’s unclear how much of Schwartz’s voice and boops ended up in the final film — Bill Hader also came in to lend BB-8 a range of audio personality — but obviously, he had a lot of fun while doing it.
Watch BB-8 speak to Yahoo Movies:
