Sometimes it doesn’t pay to overshadow your action star lead, as “Andor” and “Resident Alien” actor Alan Tudyk learned the hard way while making the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi crime pic “I, Robot,” directed by Alex Proyas (“The Crow”)
Tudyk, who is a wildly talented and well-known for playing various robots (most recently seen in James Gunn‘s “Superman“), was Smith’s co-star in “I, Robot,” which the actor revealed led to some awkward events after test screenings for the 20th Century Fox movie saw audiences rating his performance as the motion-captured robot Sonny (a murder suspect) higher than Smith’s cyborg cop leading to his removal from the press and marketing materials (basically, downplaying his involvement entirely).
In Alan Tudyk’s own words speaking with the podcast “Toon’d In with Jim Cummings” on what happened, “They were doing test audiences with the movie and they score the characters [making a check-list motion on a pretend test screening card] in this kind of test audience and I got word back, ‘Alan, you’re testing higher than Will Smith.’ And then I was gone, I was done, there was no publicity. My name was not mentioned…I was shocked…I put a lot into it…At the time, I was very upset.”
Was this childish retaliation based on bruised egos or simply studio executives/producers tinkering with press materials for some other unknown reason? Who knows, Tudyk does a good job trying to be diplomatic about the situation in the re-telling, but it certainly sounds like someone got ticked off enough to go out of their way to diminish his contributions to the movie.
The sci-fi detective movie set in 2035 was loosely based on Issac Asimov‘s (“Foundation”) work and felt a bit more squeaky clean than other Proyas’ grittier films like his bleak noir sci-fi pic “Dark City,” closer visually to a Steven Spielberg sci-fi movie of the early 2000s like “Minority Report” (released two years earlier by Fox).
“I, Robot”, like “I Am Legend,” wasn’t exactly Smith’s finest hour as an action lead, but the movie certainly had its flaws (some of the VFX weren’t up to snuff for the era and not even sequence has aged well) beyond his uncharismatic, dull performance as the character itself was written as a hard-to-like protagonist prone to bigotry (felt like it was trying to homage things like “Alien Nation“), which didn’t do Smith any favors either.
You can watch Alan Tudyk’s full chat on Cummings’ podcast below.
Alan Tudyk revealing his name was removed from all I, ROBOT press and marketing after his performance tested higher than Will Smith 👀 pic.twitter.com/W4XFQtEtD7
— Todd Spence (@Todd_Spence) August 11, 2025
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