Anthony Daniels

Anthony Daniels is a British actor and mime artist best known for playing C-3PO in eleven Star Wars films, from Star Wars (1977) to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), wearing the costume and voicing the character in the films and in several animated series. He did not want to play a robotic character at first. Ralph McQuarrie's original concept painting of C-3PO and R2-D2 standing on Tatooine changed his mind, because the image evoked empathy from him, which is a revealing reason to take a job: he signed on to a machine because he could feel sorry for it.

The craft problem is genuinely unusual. Inside a rigid gold shell he has no face, barely usable hands and almost no peripheral vision, so the performance has to happen in the tilt of the head, the angle of the arms and the timing of a turn. The voice does the rest, pitched as a fussy English butler in a permanent state of near-panic, and it carries more than people credit. C-3PO is the only character in Star Wars who repeatedly says out loud that all of this is terrifying, which is why he works as a comic figure and also why the films need him.

The continuity is the record. He appears in all nine numbered episodes plus Rogue One and Solo, in which he plays a different character entirely, and he has carried the role into The Clone Wars, the Droids cartoons, the Lego specials and The Lego Movie. That is more than four decades of work inside one costume, and nobody else in that franchise comes close.