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While the animated movie of the summer is here with Inside Out 2, get ready to ugly cry about the bond between a robot and a gosling in this fall’s The Wild Robot. The DreamWorks flick based on the middle grade novel stars Oscar-winner Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, a robot who finds herself booting up her program in the middle of a deserted island and making friends with its woodland animals – particularly through stepping up to mother an orphaned gosling. While making the flick across three years, Nyong’o recalled the toll it took on her voice.
When CinemaBlend attended an event at DreamWorks Studios in Glendale, California back in May, Lupita Nyong’o spoke about her journey playing Roz alongside writer/director Chris Sanders. During the discussion, Nyong’o said this about finding the voice for the animated character:
The beginning of the film, I would say, was the greatest departure from my resting voice. And it’s where she’s the greenest, right? So she’s this sophisticated being but on this island. She’s like a newborn baby, right? She’s learning everything for the first time. And so, I was hoping to convey that sort of openness andI would say like that programmed optimism that these things like Siri and stuff, try to relay. You know, that high pitched, open, friendly, kind of non-threatening female sound was what I was going for. And it’s a workout. It’s a vocal workout, for sure. And I may have done it too long and too hard, and I paid for that.
Nyong’o was initially inspired by voice assistants found on our phones and other electronic devices when it comes to playing Roz, but wow, did she not realize how that would affect her voice. When the actress spoke to Entertainment Weekly, she expanded on how it damaged her voice further. In her words:
It was a four-day stretch, and we had been doing four- or five-hour sessions every day. And because Roz starts in a more factory-setting sound, she has this overall positive inflection and tone. And then, as she gets more integrated in the animal kingdom that she’s a part of, her voice grows more. And so actually, the hardest part for me was her first voice, which is that very high-pitched, positive [sound] — it’s a different resonance from my own, so it was quite acrobatic for me to do that. It was a day where we’d started off in that voice, go into her second and third voice, and then go back to the first voice. The repetition of going to that high-pitched, highly resonant head space resulted in me having a vocal injury. I ended up developing a vocal polyp and spent three months in silence.
In the interview, Nyong’o clarified that she literally spent three months in silence after her doctor said she could “stave off surgery” simply by doing a lot of vocal rest. The actress decided to commit to that and was able to heal her voice by “just shutting up.” It’s tough not to think about the coincidence of the story in regards to her also being part of this summer’s A Quiet Place spinoff. She literally couldn’t speak, it just wasn’t because of an alien invasion!
During the DreamWorks event, Nyong’o also detailed how important it was for her to discuss Roz’s arc with Chris Sanders. She knew she was in good hands considering the filmmaker is behind movies like Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon, but she needed some convincing in regards to playing a robot who doesn’t have emotion. Nyong’o shared as an actor, her “currency” is emotion, but after their many talks, she arrived at the way she wanted to play the new DreamWorks protagonist.
The Wild Robot caught our attention as something exciting to anticipate during Universal’s 2024 CinemaCon panel and through its emotional trailer. The DreamWorks movie hits theaters on September 27. Check out what other 2024 movies are coming our way in the meantime here on CinemaBlend.