Lilo & Stitch: Zach Galifianakis' Role in Live-Action Remake May Have Been Revealed

On Friday, it was reported that Zac Galifianakis had been cast in the live-action remake of Disney's Lilo & Stitch in an unknown role. Now, that role may have been revealed. According to The Wrap, Galifianakis will be playing Pleakley, an alien character that was voiced by Kevin McDonald in the animated classic. In the original Lilo & Stitch, Pleakley was a member of the Galactic Federation who reluctantly became Jumba Jookiba's partner as an "Earth expert" and was forced to assist him in capturing the escaped Experiment 626 — aka Stitch. The live-action film is set to be a new take on the beloved 2002 film and is set to be helmed by Dean Fleischer Camp on a script from Chris Kekaniokalani Bright. Casting for other roles, particularly that of Lilo and her sister, Nani, is underway.

What will the live-action Lilo & Stitch be about?

Lilo & Stitch follows the bond formed between a lonely human girl named Lilo and a dog-like alien named Stitch, who was genetically engineered to be a force of destruction. With nosy social workers and pursuing aliens banging on the door, the two bonded over a shared sense of family and win the day.

A live-action Lilo & Stitch has been reported about since 2018, leaving many fans curious to see how the unique story might be adapted into a live-action context. Previous rumors had suggested that Jon M. Chu, whose work includes In the Heights and Crazy Rich Asians, was in talks to helm the film. 

"I mean, I think it's such a gift as a filmmaker to have made a short that you know works and is like, we're making a movie adaptation to this because the shorts were so fun," Camp recently told ComicBook.com of his work on the Marcel the Shell film. "So, it's such a great tuning fork to have in your back pocket. Whenever you're like, 'Something feels wrong about this,' you can like go back to those and be like, "Oh, right. Well, that's not really in the film grammar, or Marcel would never say that or whatever."

"It's so incredibly useful to have that. And then I think it was often a case of, Jenny and I, because we had been developing this character for so long, know Marcel so well, and I know the Marcel-ian visual language so well at this point, that it becomes ... Sometimes I can't even really articulate it very well, like right now. But when you see it, you're just like, 'No, that's wrong. Obviously, that's wrong.' So, I think it's a combination of that and always asking ourselves, is it documentary? Would this character really do this during a documentary? Would you actually be able to ... A lot of times the difficulty of writing this, that Nick Paley, our co-writer and I would run into, is like, it's a documentary, so how do you tell a story that is scripted and that deserves and needs big emotional moments? How would you do that if you were a documentary, and you couldn't just have a character monologue by himself in a perfectly composed shot? So, figuring out the language I think was important."

What do you think about the possibility of Galifianakis playing Pleakley? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.