For The Horde!

Toby Kebbell goes green

Who is Durotan?

I’m the chief of the Frostwolf Clan. Our world isn’t living as well as it was. I take my pregnant, expecting wife to find a new homeland because there’s nothing to hunt, there’s nothing to eat. Gul’dan, he’s all in on this fel magic, saying “this is what we all have to do, this is how we’ll all survive”. I’m less convinced.

How did you learn to play an Orc? Was it difficult?

As an actor your process is to find the voice and to find a walk. The Orc walk was brought to us by Terry Notary, who set us through a short period of school. It’s like, you tie a tie around your waist, and you let it drag between your legs to keep your centre of gravity low. The voice came when they showed us the animation of Robert Kazinsky as an Orc. We were both like, “So we have to overact?” [ laughs]

What are the biggest challenges of playing a motion capture character in films like this?

It’s much more than motion capture now. It is a performance. If that performance isn’t there, they can’t do anything with it. You have to stay alive because once the model goes dead, there’s nothing.

Did you have to learn Orcish?

We have moments of Orc language. There are moments where me and [ Garona] are having a conversation and she’s a translator. But we haven’t been studying Orcish. We actually haven’t shot it yet, so it’s not clear what we’re going to do. But definitely, we are from two different worlds.