Alan Tudyk is one of those beloved actors who’s a joy to watch no matter what he’s in. From Firefly to Dodgeball or Doom Patrol or one of my personal favorites in recent years, the Joker in the Harley Quinn Series. He even currently voices Optimus Prime in the animated Transformers: Earthspark show on Nickelodeon/Paramount Plus. Needless to say, Tudyk delivers a great performance in any project he’s in.
Tudyk stopped by the Kinda Nerdy Girls to speak with KJ about his role in Netflix’s Resident Alien, which is now in its third season. The full interview can be found on the Kinda Nerdy Girls’ YouTube page, but for now, you can enjoy a full interview transcript below!
KJ:
Good to meet you. We have some great fan questions coming up. But one of the things that I loved when I put it out to our community here on the KJ Today Show is the amount of people that were saying, oh my gosh, I just started watching Resident Alien on Netflix. So for those who have just discovered the show, which is back in its third season, can you welcome them aboard and share a little bit about your experience and what it’s like to be on such a fun show?
ALAN:
We’re having a great time. I play an alien who is not great at being a human. He didn’t study to be a human when he came down. He was just going to kill everyone. He was going to drop a bomb and kill everyone and then fly away. But he crashes and takes over this human body and gets pulled into this small town in Colorado. And he learns most of his behavior from watching Law and Order, and he likes one human. He’s got it down at least one, and he’s spread it out after season two. He likes two humans. But this season, he begrudgingly likes a kid. He’s been trying to kill this kid for a while, so now he finally is like, okay, I like you. And in season three, he’s sort of in his developmental stage of teenage years, and this season they fall in love with an actress named Edie Patterson. Her character is Blue Evian, which is the most beautiful alien in the universe. And she and I have a torrid love affair. It’s incredible. It’s the first love. It’s beautiful and ridiculous because she’s a bird and I’m kind of an octopus and the two don’t naturally fit together, but we make it work for most of the season. Yeah.
KJ:
I was curious, Alan, because when I first heard about the show, I mean, we were immediately like, episode one, we’re in Resident Alien with Alan Tudyk, sounds like something that’s going to be fantastic. I mean, I can’t imagine, and this maybe speaks to your incredible acting, I can’t imagine this show not being made for you. When they first came to you with this show, was there any doubt in your mind that you are Harry?
ALAN:
It seemed to be my kind of role. It’s like a special teams role of actors. He’s sort of robotic in the beginning. He doesn’t have emotion. I’ve played a few robots in my time, uh, it’s in the sci-fi world, but there’s a lot of comedy involved. It’s sort of a theater performance because it’s full body how he’s moving. He’s trying to figure it out and, I’d started in the theater, so I had that education. It seemed right, but any actor, whenever they go into an audition, they’ve convinced themselves, this role is so perfect for me. This is the right role. How could they cast anyone but me? So, you’re used to being wrong about that stuff, but luckily they said, hey, come up to Vancouver, let’s shoot this show. And we’ve done three seasons of it now.
KJ:
And speaking of roles, when trying to figure out, gosh, I’ve got 10 minutes with Alan. There’s so much we want to talk about from A Knight’s Tale to Dodgeball. I have questions about Patch Adams and, of course, Firefly. Is there a particular role that you have played that does come up more often than any of the others? Is this is what people know you for?
ALAN:
You know what? It’s A Knight’s Tale. A lot of times it’s like the people. I don’t know why that movie just it’s really great for young. You know, if I had children, I would show it to them because it’s got, you know, it’s a it’s a fairy tale and there’s no blood and it’s just a fun movie. Good music. They recognize my face from that. Uh, Firefly also Firefly, which was a TV show that was on, you know, for only 14 episodes, but the fans, if they see me out, they’ll come up just to say, “Hey, um, you know, I’m a leaf on the wind.” They’ll say, you know, some line from the show or whatever, just huge, huge Firefly fan. And so I meet a lot of those people as well, which is great. They got a whole movie made, the fans from Firefly, after 14 episodes. The love that came from them convinced the studio to make a movie. So, thanks.
KJ:
Alan, I want to switch over to your voice work real quick because again, I go to our network and I’m like, what do you want to know? And it came up over and over. People just love Hey Hey the Rooster from Moana and wanting to know, you know, how, just how much time you spent in studio, you know, with your ton of talent and your training at Juilliard making rooster sounds.
ALAN:
It was, I think it was four hours, four, four or six hours. That was it. There was really no, no, I mean, they, they didn’t need to consult with me on character development or anything like that. So, you know, we just watched it a few times and I would cluck along with the thing. You know, he’s on the boat, goes underwater, gets out of the water and just sort of follow along and cluck where I felt he needed to, he had something to say.
KJ:
Before I let you go, we got to talk Star Wars. I have a friend who was a handler with you at a con, and he said you got to ask him about the ad-libbing that he did with Rogue One.
ALAN:
Yeah, Rogue One, we had a lot of fun. The script was always a little fluid in Rogue One. It changed a lot, oddly. Um, and so we did six months, uh, and, uh, Gareth Edwards was the director and he was very open to it. So, my favorite moment is, I slapped Diego Luna and I say “there’s a fresh one if you mouth off a game.” And that wasn’t in the script at all. And what’s great is they use the take. I just did it because when you’re a motion capture actor, they color you out and they put in the robot and they use all your movements and your voice. But so what that means is you only have to do it right once. And then after that, every take after that is yours to play with because they can just put the right one in. It’s very easy to screw around. So, I screwed around a lot. And they use that take and Diego is laughing. He barely covers his face. He covers his face to get hit because he just got hit in the face. But he you can see the other half of the smile that he doesn’t cover up. And it’s a it’s a funny little Easter egg moment there that he’s laughing in the movie of Rogue One, which is not a funny movie as much as it is a tragedy.
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