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The Actress Who Plays L3-37 In Solo Is Gorgeous In Real Life

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Behind the clanking chassis of Solo’s droid-rights firebrand is one of British television’s sharpest writers.

Audiences who caught Solo: A Star Wars Story in May 2018 met L3-37, the self-made droid co-pilot who spends most of her screen time lecturing Lando Calrissian about labor rights while flying his ship. What they didn’t see was the actress underneath the motion-capture rig: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a RADA-trained writer and performer who was already stacking up some of the most acclaimed credits in British comedy before she ever put on a green suit.

• Waller-Bridge voices and physically performs L3-37 via motion capture in Solo: A Star Wars Story, playing opposite Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian.
• She created, wrote and starred in Channel 4’s Crashing (2016), then adapted her own Edinburgh Festival Fringe solo play Fleabag into the BBC/Amazon series that won her a BAFTA TV Award.
• She developed and served as head writer and executive producer on BBC America’s Killing Eve, which premiered in April 2018 and earned her a 2018 Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series.

From Fringe Stage to Fleabag

Waller-Bridge’s path to a galaxy far, far away started in a much smaller room. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she built her one-woman show Fleabag for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, a bare-bones character study that eventually became the basis for the 2016 BBC/Amazon series of the same name. The show turned her into one of the most talked-about voices in British comedy and picked up a BAFTA TV Award along the way — proof that the sharp, confessional writing style she’d later bring to a droid on a Star Wars set had already been road-tested in front of live audiences.

Before that breakthrough, she’d created and starred in Channel 4’s Crashing in 2016, a sitcom about a group of twenty-somethings living as property guardians in a converted hospital. It was Waller-Bridge’s first major calling card as a creator-performer, the project that put her on the radar of executives who’d later come calling for something much darker.

Killing Eve and the Emmy Nomination

That darker project was Killing Eve, the BBC America thriller Waller-Bridge developed and ran as head writer and executive producer. The series, which premiered in April 2018 to widespread critical praise, earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination that same year for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. It’s the kind of resume line that makes her casting as L3-37 look less like a novelty and more like Lucasfilm bringing in one of television’s hottest writers to voice its most opinionated droid.

Playing a Droid Without Knowing What a Droid Is

The strangest part of Waller-Bridge’s Solo story might be how she landed the role in the first place. In interviews about L3-37, she’s said that during her initial audition she genuinely didn’t know what a droid was supposed to be, so she simply played the part organically, reacting on instinct rather than trying to imitate any established droid archetype. Only after landing the role did she suit up in the green motion-capture gear and practical droid elements used on the Solo set.

She didn’t know what a droid was — she just played L3-37 as herself, and Lucasfilm built the robot around that performance.

That approach is exactly why L3-37 doesn’t sound like the clipped, mechanical droids audiences are used to from the earlier films. She’s opinionated, funny and a little exhausting to be around — because Waller-Bridge wasn’t performing “droid,” she was performing a person who happens to be encased in metal. That same instinct for character work is what’s carried her from Fringe solo shows to a BAFTA to an Emmy nomination in the span of a few years, and it’s the reason directors kept finding new places to put her, from Channel 4 sitcoms to a galaxy run by the Empire.