Guardians Of The Galaxy Recruited A Real Life Mime To Help Create Groot

Whenever a film decides to utilize a fully digital character, there are a number of avenues the production can take in order to achieve that effect. The one we're probably most familiar with is performance capture. This process has been used brilliantly over the last 20 years to make some truly excellent characters, as in the "Avatar" films, and making an actor like Andy Serkis a household name. Yes, it has created some truly cursed films as well, like "The Polar Express," but it has become a reliable technique for big-budget productions. However, this very involved, technical filmmaking process isn't conducive to every kind of film shoot, particularly when the voice of the character will be markedly different from the person on set.

The "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies prominently feature two digital characters: Rocket Raccoon and Groot. Neither of them are brought to life through performance capture technology. However, that doesn't mean there isn't anyone on set performing these characters as if performance capture was indeed being done. For Rocket Raccoon in the first movie, director James Gunn looked to his own brother Sean Gunn, who would also go on to play Kraglin in the series, to play Rocket on set before Bradley Cooper would voice the character. Getting a regular actor to take on that responsibility makes a lot of sense, as Rocket is basically like any other character. He's just a Raccoon.

Groot is a different story. This is a massive tree man who barely speaks, and despite his massive size, he has a lightness about his movement that isn't particularly brutish. Finding a person who fulfills that dichotomy is rather difficult, particularly for film actors. So, they turned to someone whose job is to be entirely physical: a mime.

For "Guardians of the Galaxy," the technique used to shoot scenes with digital characters involves shooting what are called plates. Basically, a shot featuring a digital character would be shot twice: once with the on-set actor in a green or blue jumpsuit and once without anyone there. The on-set Groot on the first "Guardians of the Galaxy" was a Polish actor named Krystian Godlewski, someone with decades of mime, dance, and movement training under his belt. Theoretically, the production could have just used the classic "tennis ball on a stick" to achieve eye lines for actors like Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldaña with the digital characters, but that's never going to generate the best performances, as associate visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti said to FX Guide in 2014:

"The most important thing for us was to make sure all the acting would be believable and that the actors would be able to respond to another actor. Groot doesn't have much to say – he says 'I am Groot' most of the time ... but he has a lot of expression on his face and this determines what he means."

Having someone as physically adept as Godlewski on set to wear a full-bodied blue suit and a facsimile Groot head on top of his own was the only way to make Groot a credible presence in this world. As Groot essentially gets reborn at the end of the movie as a baby, which carries over into "Vol. 2," Godlewski wasn't necessary to bring back for the sequel. Though he is back to adulthood in "Vol. 3," his physicality is radically different, and actor Austin Freeman served as the on-set Groot. Each iteration required its own unique performance, and the first time up, it needed a mime.