Recently, I got to attend a press event for Disney XD's LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures and chat with Matthew Wood, who's not only the voice of R0-GR (aka "Roger") on that show but the supervising sound editor on Star Wars Rebels, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Episode VIII. He was also the voice of General Grievous in Episode III and on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, plus a smattering of other characters (including the battle droids) across the Star Wars saga.
During our chat, we talked about Wood's sympathy for battle droids, editing sound on the new Star Wars movies, and the awesomeness that is LEGO...
IGN TV: So first of all, obviously, you have a long history voicing the battle droids and General Grievous and these other Star Wars bad guys. What's it like for you now to switch it up and play Roger, who's sort of a good guy but still that same type of droid as the old ones?
Matthew Wood: It's funny, even when I did the battle droids for Clone Wars, I had a real feeling for those guys. I just thought they a got a raw deal. I mean, when we see them in the story, they're always going up against Jedi. George Lucas told me, he was like, 'The battle droids, they've got cheap processors.' It would be very expensive for the Separatists to stamp out like millions of these things, because they can't; they're just too expensive. So, up against clones, en masse, they do alright. But as soon as you get a Jedi in there, they're just gonna get mowed down completely, there's no hope.
Then Grievous, who was always sort of the Droid Army leader, was just continually frustrated by his battle droids' ineptitude. So I felt for him because he wasn't given an army that he could really do anything with against the Jedi, and then I felt for the battle droids just because they were being led into certain death -- and we had lines to reflect that, you know? "It won't matter!" They had lines to show they were upset.
B1 Battle Droids in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
The beauty about the battle droids is that they don't have a mouth. I was working on post-production sound as well on the show, so I would get to see the final animation, and we still had time to inject things in there. Because they didn't have a mouth, it meant that we didn't have to reanimate it if we wanted to put little bits of humor in the show. So we really got to craft and fine-tune it down the last minute with those guys, and that was always fun to do.
So playing [Roger] in Freemakers, I feel I'm already in touch with [the battle droids'] plight, and now I have even more compassion for the character because he's one of the last ones left. And when he starts hearing things about his origins and it's in conflict for what his belief is for himself, you see him have these realizations about what his role was in the Clone Wars. You know, it's just fun. I think [showrunners Bill Motz and Bob Roth] know Star Wars inside and out, so for them to write that level of connection to the Star Wars universe into these characters has just been a dream to play with.
R0-GR and Rowan in LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures
IGN: I know they mentioned in the press conference that we're not going to get the tragic family backstory for the Freemakers, but we've already gotten a few hints about Roger's time in the Clone Wars. Are we going to get more hints of where he's been and who he's met as the show goes on?
Wood: Yeah, I think it slowly comes out over the show, like where he's been, and it bonds them together, this group of scavengers with Roger. They've all got stories, as everyone does. You have things in your past that you have to move on from to move forward in your life. But they find that bond together to sort of drive them to happier times. But yeah, it's very well-crafted. Bill and Bob and Carrie [Beck], from Lucasfilm, have definitely put their energy into this show, and it really shows for us as the actors to have that. It's really well-written.
IGN: As a voice actor, do you have a preference between playing the battle droids or Grievous, or any of the characters you've done?
Wood: Yeah, I do like playing characters that are overly dramatic with their voice. You know, Grievous was this big, kind of deep thing I had to do, and because I'm a sound person, I can also manipulate the synthesis of the sound with the computer to enhance that -- because all the droids and Grievous are synthesized, so I have a certain amount of latitude. I can tweak them. You know, Grievous was the extreme [Grievous voice] "speaking like this!" while the battle droids [Roger voice] "are all up here!" So they're just totally opposite -- especially when I had scenes of them together, so I would just do the whole scene talking to myself.
General Grievous in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
But I love on this show, Roger's got some emotional scenes, and to speak "in this tone" but you're also being caring is -- it's humorous, but you still love it. I don't know how you could ever take him seriously, because of his voice being like that, but when he tries it makes everything sort of darkly funny.
IGN: Were you into LEGO growing up?
Wood: Totally. My brother and sister both, we all loved LEGO. You know, and the sets they have now are so incredible. I've just been seeing -- as I'm working at Lucasfilm on Star Wars stuff, I get to see LEGO that's like Grievous's ship or even the Freemaker stuff that I've seen recently, God, it's so intricate now!
IGN: Yeah, the sets they had on display inside were really cool-looking.
Wood: Yeah, really cool. So I've got a few that I'm gonna start playing with. But as a kid, yeah, we were like the Freemakers; we just kind of made it up as we went and had a big, huge basket filled with LEGO. We would just take our time for hours building ships and cars and all kinds of vehicles, little castles and bases, stuff like that. I love LEGO.
The great thing about 'em, too, is that they never go obsolete. I had a huge amount of LEGO at my grandparents' house, and they passed away, and I remember going and -- you know, they had LEGO for us to play with -- and I went into that room, and there were all those LEGO we had as kids, and you can still play with them! It's not like, "Oh, that operating system doesn't work anymore. It doesn't read those floppies anymore." You can just pick them up, and they're the exact same dimensions that they were whenever LEGO was incepted. You can play with them now, just like when you were a kid.
LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures Star Scavenger set
IGN: Do you record the show here in LA?
Wood: I do, yeah. We come down, and we read it out loud in Burbank. The whole cast goes, and I go to every recording. I come down here physically, even though I know I could remote it in. I love working with the whole cast together. Any excuse you have to get together and do Star Wars, I mean, you're gonna do it. [Laughs]
IGN: That's cool! And I know you're probably crazy-busy sound editing the new movies and Rebels and everything else, so how are you balancing the voice work with the sound work?
Wood: Well, sometimes it gets a little tricky. [Laughs] I remember on Force Awakens, we were finishing that up, and we were actually at Fox here in LA. Normally, I work up at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, and... I don't really know LA that well, but I was like, "Oh, I'm working in Century City, and I've just gotta go over to Burbank to go record. I can just pop over there, no problem. I'll just sneak out, and no one will know I'm gone. I'll just take a long lunch." Then, you know, two hours of traffic in both directions, I could have probably flown all the way to San Francisco and gone to the Ranch in the time it took me to get over there. [Laughs]
But yeah, I remember taking J.J. [Abrams] aside and being like, "I've got to take an hour. They've got me, and I'm doing this show," and he was like, "Go for it." So then I'd come into the studio to do the recordings, and I'd be like, "I just worked with Harrison Ford today!" and they'd be like, "Oh my gosh!" So that was fun, just as a fan of Star Wars too, to be able to tell that to other cast members.
For more on Wood's sound design for Rogue One, check out our feature on that, as well as our coverage and review of LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures, airing Mondays on Disney XD.
Max Nicholson is a writer for IGN, and he desperately seeks your approval. Show him some love by following @Max_Nicholson on Twitter and MaxNicholson on IGN.
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