When he's not starring in the HBO series Silicon Valley, T.J. Miller's been making a name for himself in Hollywood through movies like Big Hero 6, Deadpool, Office Christmas Party and The Emoji Movie. He'll continue along that path next year when he appears in Steven Spielberg's adaptation of the Ernest Cline novel Ready Player One. We've known since Miller's casting was announced last year that he'd be playing an online troll, but now Miller has revealed that his character is an amusing bounty hunter who aspires to be like Boba Fett from the world of Star Wars. Miller explained:
I'm not in the book. Some plot points are different, but I'm the only new character. I play i-R0k and basically I am a funny, or at least mildly amusing, Boba Fett. In the OASIS, I am a better player than Aech or Daito or any of those guys. I am sort of unequivocally the best bounty hunter, but I work freelance. While all the Sixers work for IOI and Sorrento, he has to commission me and I get an incredibly high fee to either find people and kill them or make them starve in the game. My character in the movie wants to be Boba Fett. Like that's his hero, his idol, which isn't far off for many Star Wars fans, myself included.
It's worth noting that contrary to what T.J. Miller said, i-R0k did appear in the Ready Player One novel, but because he was such a minor character, the movie has made him into someone more significant. To that end, Miller's i-R0k has been morphed into a bounty hunter who will take out any player in the OASIS for the right price. That's the same line of work Boba Fett took on in a galaxy far, far away, but unlike i-R0k, Boba isn't known for his humorous personality.
Miller added in his interview with Fandango that he mimicked Boba Fett's original voice from The Empire Strikes Back while playing i-R0k, i.e. Jason Wingreen, as opposed to Temuera Morrison, who became Boba Fett's new voice after playing Jango Fett and his clones. Given Ready Player One's emphasis on 1980s pop culture, it's appropriate that Miller looked to the original Star Wars cuts for inspiration.
Like the 2012 book, the Ready Player One movie follows a global hunt in the OASIS virtual world for an Easter Egg left behind by the OASIS creator, James Halliday. Whoever finds the Easter Egg will inherit Halliday's fortune. Besides T.J. Miller, the cast includes Tye Sheridan as Wade Watts/Parzival, Olivia Cooke as Art3mis, Ben Mendelsohn as Nolan Sorrento, Mark Rylance as James Halliday/Anorak and Simon Pegg as Ogden Morrow.
Ready Player One hits theaters on March 30, 2018.
