Why Star Wars Only Showed C-3PO's Upper Half When Sitting

He's golden. He's a little prissy. His best buddy is a smaller droid named R2-D2 who annoys him to no end. He's fluent in over six million forms of communication, as he likes to tell everyone as often as he can. C-3PO, human/cyborg relations, is an indelible part of "Star Wars" and actor Anthony Daniels played the role to perfection throughout the Skywalker Saga. C-3PO probably would have preferred a life of serving as a translator at a high-end hotel on Coruscant or something, but when you're built by the future evil dictator of the galaxy, life is complicated.

It wasn't easy for Daniels either, going by the amount of work that went into his costume. It was difficult to move in and not exactly comfortable. In fact, Daniels couldn't sit down at all when they were filming "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back," according to Reader's Digest. It involved some creative maneuvering on the filmmakers' part to do any scene that involved C-3PO taking a load off of those gold tootsies.

Per the outlet, Anthony Daniels couldn't sit at all on the "Empire Strikes Back" set. As such, for scenes like the one where R2-D2 is reattaching one of C-3PO's legs to his body, Daniels would have to be set in place without the C-3PO costume. The film's crew would then build the rest of the scene around him. Daniels also talked about this during a 2020 video interview with Wired. He explained:

"So, a sitting down moment was even more fun because there's a point later on where 3PO is sitting on a box and R2's there, and he's got a foot and a welding torch, and he, in my book, he was saying, and I'm saying, 'Where do you think it goes?' [...] I wasn't sitting on the box. I was kneeling on the floor through the box with my feet coming out of the side. Magic."

It's no secret that "Star Wars" creator George Lucas and concept designer Ralph McQuarrie drew inspiration from Maria/The Machine Man (Brigitte Helm) in Fritz Lang's silent 1927 classic "Metropolis" for C-3PO. (The pair look remarkably similar.) Daniels said in the Wired video that they first did a body cast on him, with sculptor Liz Moore adding clay to the cast to create the look. He was actually dressed in the 17 pieces for his original costume by the prop department, as opposed to the costume department. It all sounds like something C-3PO would definitely complain about.

All the "Star Wars" films are streaming on Disney+.