Auditory 'Rogue One' Easter Eggs Revealed By Sound Editors Matthew Wood And Christopher Scarabosio

Last week, I got an opportunity to chat with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story supervising sound editors Matthew Wood and Christopher Scarabosio about their work on the film. During the conversation, they revealed their secret voice cameos in the film and a bunch of auditory Rogue One Easter eggs that you probably missed, and much, much more.

Matt, you have done voices for some of the Star Wars films. You've voiced Bib Fortuna, General Grievous, Battle Droids, Ello Asty, Quiggold and many others. Did you have a voice cameo in Rogue One?Matthew: Yeah, I did. In fact, Chris and I both did to be quite honest. In Rogue One I played the voice of the character Pao. I also did some Stormtrooper voices. And I also was the voice of anything Deathtrooper related. All the weird sort of encrypted dialect that's coming out of the Deathtrooper's voices to make that scary sound, that was my voice.That's awesome. And, Chris, who did you play?Christopher: I was the Houjix guy.Matthew: Saw's guys are playing Dejarik holo-chess, and Chris is the guy gets a Yahtzee.Christopher: Yeah, basically the guy throwing the dice and playing the game and he throws the die, and he reacts to it, and he's very excited, and rest of the players are kind of like oh... So the appropriate thing we determined after checking with the people who makes these things was Houjix.Matthew: We did consult with the Lucasfilm Story Group, and that was the name of the piece, the Houjix. You know, all those pieces in that original chess game on the Millennium Falcon hologram holo chess have names, and that was the name of the chess piece that had fallen down right there. So he yells out Houjix.That is awesome. I know that a bunch of other Star Wars Rebels cast members have some voice cameos. Could you shed some light on where we might be able to find them?Matthew: Yeah. One of the things I like to do on the Star Wars films is I hire a really great group of background voice actors and additional voice actors to do like Stormtroopers and creatures and people in the markets and that kind of thing. And I went across the genre just like I did on Force Awakens and I used my main cast. I have Sam Witwer who plays Darth Maul in both The Clone Wars and Rebels do some Stormtrooper voices along with David Collins, who's another Star Wars alumni from the video games. And I had them do a lot of the Stormtrooper voices. And then and I even went back as far as the original trilogy, I got the voice of the gentleman who played Wedge, David Ankrum, to voice a little cameo on Yavin 4 to have all their ships head out to go to the battle on Scarif.Oh really? So David Ankrum reprised his iconic role as Wedge in Rogue One?Mathew: Yeah. That was David Ankrum. He was thrilled to come back, and we recorded him and yeah, so those kinds of things, you just try to connect back. You know, we try to connect things to some Star Wars something. Something in the universe that we can connect to a fan that'll enjoy that part of Star Wars, wherever they grew up and whether it's Clone Wars, the prequels, the original trilogy, or Rebels, I try to connect the actors. And even the actors themselves feel a real certain respect for the Star Wars universe, and so they're overjoyed to come back and work with us again.Oh, for sure. Might there be other like characters from Rebels we might hear in the background or Clone Wars that like...?Matthew: The only thing, I mean, actually Pao, I had him say "Karabast" right before the AT-AT's attack. He says, "Karabast." And then he goes "AT-AT." And I wanted to have a Rebels-era slang in there. And then we had David Collins do a P.A. announcement where he's referring to General Syndulla. And then we have Chopper in one scene. And we also see the Ghost as well. So we tried to put as many connections in there as we could.That General Syndulla line, does that come out of an idea that you guys came up with or like how does that come about?Matthew: It's a mutual thing.  I mean, like I consulted with our story group, with Pablo Hidalgo and Leland Chee, and they, in turn, consulted with Dave Filoni. And we're all friends, and we're all like, hey, this would be a cool thing to do. And I think it would make sense. And let's make it happen.Are there any other Easter eggs that fans should be on the lookout for in the film? Or listen for rather?Matthew: They can look out for the TC-15s, that's something that fans can look out for. That's all I can say about that.

***

Check back tomorrow for the second part of our interview with Chris and Matt.

If you haven't already, check out our extensive rundown of all of the Rogue One easter eggs.