BB-9E
How do you follow an act like the adorable droid BB-8? Give him an evil doppelgänger.
“When we had a look at how to perform BB-8 with J.J. initially, we, dare I say, used the ‘[pull the] heartstrings’ approach, with the slight cocks of the head and the cheeky ways of using body language to convey his emotions,” Scanlan says of the sweet soccer ball-like robot.
“So when [director] Rian said there was the idea of an evil counterpart, it really just sort of was the same thing,” he says. “He’s much more cold, he’s less emotional.
“There’s something lovely and cute about a soft-domed head that BB-8 has. It’s almost like a baby, whereas [BB-9E’s] more conical head is much more military, much less engaging,” Scanlan says.
“The same with the grills, you know, the simplification of a very strong geometric grill and the technology sitting behind [them] . . . is much more threatening than BB-8 as well.
“There’s a lot of threat and a lot of badness in this droid.”