Alan Tudyk played a major role in the 2004 techno thriller I, Robot, but you might not know that.
His character’s popularity was downplayed, Tudyk claims, by the studio formerly known as 20th Century Fox. The Resident Alien star unspooled the story, which does not depict the I, Robot‘s production house or its star, Will Smith, in a very flattering light, in a July interview on prolific voice actor Jim Cummings’ Toon’d In! podcast.
“A lot of people didn’t know I did Sonny the robot in I, Robot, and there’s a reason for that, actually,” he explained. “They were doing test audiences with the movie, and they score the characters in this kind of test audience, and I got word back, ‘Alan, you’re testing higher than Will Smith.'”
According to Tudyk, it was as simple as that, and the consequences hit swiftly: “Then I was gone. I was done. There was no publicity, and my name was not mentioned.”
20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett
Will Smith and Alan Tudyk star in ‘I, Robot’
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to representatives for Smith and Disney, which now owns the rebranded 20th Century Studios.
Directed by sci-fi visionary Alex Proyas, who’d previously helmed The Crow and Dark City, I, Robot draws on the complex, techno-paranoiac corpus of famed “father of science fiction” Isaac Asimov. The film stars Smith as a detective in a near-future utopia in which humanity is served by a legion of compliant robots. He quickly discovers cracks in the facade, behind which lies a dark and brutal dystopia in which robots like Sonny (Tudyk) are suffering and are programmed to make others suffer.
Tudyk portrayed Sonny via 2004’s most cutting-edge voice and motion capture technologies. The morally ambiguous character is deliberately designed as a foil to Smith’s Detective Spooner, who is far less trusting of the robot half of society than his fellow humans.
But in a canny bit of art imitating life, Tudyk claims Smith’s primacy caused him to be shunted into the darkness in much the same way I, Robot‘s society treats its mechanical characters.
“I was so shocked, I was like, ‘Wait, what? How do they — nobody’s going to know that I —’ and [Fox] was like, ‘Mhm,'” Tudyk recalled. “It was sad. I put a lot into it, because he had to move like a robot, so I had to move [like a robot]…. At the time, I was very upset.”
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The sour memory of studio decision-making may be close to the surface in Tudyk’s mind due to a recent bout of the same: Late last month, USA Network canceled Resident Alien, just weeks before it was set to air its season 4 finale — now its series finale. Speaking to EW at San Diego Comic-Con 2025 on the day the cancellation was announced, Tudyk let out a long, pained groan in response.
Tudyk’s costar, Sara Tomko, joked, “He had just forgotten, then remembered all over again.”
“I think we hoped there was a possibility we could go on,” Tomko continued, but said, “It’s just nice to feel like we’ve offered a solution to ourselves as writers, as a cast, to be able to just say, ‘This is where this particular story arc ends. I think fans will be really, really satisfied with that, as we are.”
You can watch the rest of Tudyk’s interview on the Toon’d In! podcast above.
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