Lupita Nyong’o had years to perfect her voice as Roz in “The Wild Robot” and she used every bit of it.
The animated film, which hit the Toronto International Film Festival this past weekend, is an adaptation of the Peter Brown book and tells the story of a shipwrecked robot on an uninhabited island who bonds with the animals and begins caring for an orphaned baby goose.
Sitting down at TheWrap’s 2024 TIFF Studio sponsored by Moët & Chandon and Boss Design, Nyong’o explained how she worked with director Chris Sanders on the process of voicing Roz.
“I came in with some ideas and I shared them with him … the good thing about working on an animation is that it takes years, so you have a lot of time to try things out and then throw out what doesn’t work and try something else,” she said. “But what Chris had told me at the beginning was one of the reasons he thought I would be good for the role was that he liked the warmth of my voice. And so the idea that Roz would get to a place of that sort of closer to me, that the warmth that I — well, that he says that I have — and then it was working backwards to figure out, ‘Where does she start off as a robot that is not programmed with individuality and is quite outside of her comfort zone?’”
She continued, “We worked on that and found a more, I guess, two dimensional sound that she starts off with, before she finds that texture through her experience adapting to this wild environment.”
Costar Stephanie Hsu added that her focus while voicing character Vontra was to create a villain that sounded “chipper.”
“We wanted to create a villain that wasn’t just like a big scary robot, although no robots sound like that, but we wanted to find something that was so chipper that it was disarming,” she explained.
You can watch TheWrap’s full interview with “The Wild Robot” cast above.
“The Wild Robot” releases in theaters Sept. 26.
