How “Rebel Moon — Part Two” got the robot Jimmy to fight like that

Director Zack Snyder and stunt coordinator Freddy Bouciegues explain their chivalrous killer android.

Here comes one hell of a robot! The first half of Zack Snyder's Rebel Moon was all about setting up the pieces of the story, with Kora (Sofia Boutella) assembling the team of heroes to defend the titular moon of Veldt from the forces of the Motherworld. Now, the second half of Rebel Moon is about knocking everything down.

A majority of the runtime of Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is dedicated to the epic clash between Veldt’s defenders and the imperial forces of the Motherworld, led by the resurrected General Noble (Ed Skrein). Needless to say, it took a lot of planning.

“I remember thinking through the military strategy of ‘what if I was to defend this place?’” Rebel Moon stunt coordinator Freddy Bouciegues tells Entertainment Weekly. “I would come up with scenarios and then set some time up with Zack from his busy schedule. We would sit down and rough it out. We’d decide, ‘Okay, this makes sense over here’ or ‘that doesn’t make sense there.’ It was like playing a big board game. Once we had a rough structure, it was easier to decide the longhouse fight’s going to happen up here, and then we’ll prep this other sequence, and then that battle’s going to happen here.”

But for all Kora's efforts to recruit allies from across the universe, the biggest MVP on Veldt’s side of the battle is the robot Jimmy, voiced by Anthony Hopkins. This android knight has been searching for a new purpose since the massacre of the royal family he served (which we finally see in this movie).

“The whole idea is that he has lost the meaning of life after their deaths, and this is his chance to make a decision based on something other than a command that he had been under,” Snyder tells EW.

It takes Jimmy roughly a movie and a half to finally decide to pick up arms again and defend the innocent. But once he makes a decision, he sticks to it.

“When Jimmy fights, I really want him to be super efficient: Kind of elegant, but also brutal,” Snyder says. “He's a war machine. He can analyze you and find where your weaknesses are pretty quickly. That's his job. So whether he is tackling the big walking tank or killing the guys, he doesn't really hesitate. He is all about not hesitating. That was really the thesis with how I wanted to see him fighting.”

In order to capture both Jimmy’s heroic nature and his murderous capabilities, the physical performance was split between two stunt actors: Destin Creithammer and Trevor Logan. Not unlike the heroes of Rebel Moon, each of these two stuntmen has a different specialty.

“Dustin's super tall, so he did all of Jimmy’s acting beats and movement. Most of the time that you see him walking around or talking or kneeling, that's all Dustin,” Bouciegues says. “Then, when we got into the fighting bits, we used Trevor Logan, a super-talented martial artist and fighter. We put him in a performance capture suit, and then he did a lot of the action. A lot of the fighting is Trevor's movement. For jumping up onto the tank, we had a wire assist on Trevor in a motion capture suit.”

See Jimmy’s moves for yourself in Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver, now streaming on Netflix. 

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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.