Rogue One VFX Supervisor Explains What Makes K-2SO The ‘Anti C-3PO’

As much of a staple to the Star Wars universe as the Force, lightsabers, and epic space battles are mechanical assistants that provide varying amounts of help to human characters. The first film introduced us to C-3PO and R2-D2, The Force Awakens gave us BB-8, and with Rogue One, we were given K-2SO, a reformed Imperial droid who now worked for the Rebellion. Considering of passionate Star Wars fans are about their droids, creating a new droid for Rogue One was a difficult task, but Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll explained what made K-2SO such an asset to the story.

In addition to helping supervise the film’s visual effects, John Knoll had the initial idea for the concept behind the film and how it should explore the spies who obtained the Death Star plans that were only alluded to in the original Star Wars.

When speaking with Comicbook.com about the Rogue One Blu-ray release, Knoll explained, “I came up with the K-2SO as a part of my original story pitch. One of the original ideas there was that he’s almost the ‘anti’ C-3PO.”

Rather than trying to mimic what endeared C-3PO to fans, Knoll went a completely different direction for the new droid.

“C-3PO has these amazing abilities that are referred to, that he can speak 6 million forms of communication, talking about calculating the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field. How’s he doing that?” Knoll pondered.

“Well, clearly, it’s implied that he’s potentially running hundreds of thousands of scenarios, doing some sort of Monte Carlo analysis of successful vs. unsuccessful outcomes of those things. We thought, ‘That’s a really cool capability. If you’re putting together a team of experts with complementary skills to come together to go on a mission, you want somebody who can do those kinds of things as part of a team,’” Knoll revealed.

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“The idea was to use K-2SO for the things that are cool about a droid character like that. Another nice little detail that I liked was that K-2 doesn’t fire a weapon very often, but when he does, he never misses, it’s always a bullseye,” Knoll explained. “It’s another nice little thing. It’s a cool thing about the character.”

Which droid do you think is more heroic, K-2SO or C-3PO? Let us know in the comments!

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