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When Chris Hemsworth was presented with the challenge of playing a younger version of Optimus Prime in the animated film Transformers One, he probably thought to himself, “Roll out!” But that famous catchphrase, delivered by Peter Cullen since the original 1984 cartoon show, actually presented a challenge for Hemsworth as well.
“I don’t want to follow or mimic what Peter Cullen’s done,” the Australian recalls telling producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura when he was first offered the part. If he was going to step into another iconic character’s, err, wheels, he would need to make it his own. Fortunately, Hemsworth learned, Di Bonaventura didn’t want that either.
Written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari and directed by Pixar alum Josh Cooley (Toy Story 4), Transformers One takes place three billion years before the mainline Transformers stories, back when Optimus Prime was just Orion Pax, and Megatron (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry in the new movie) was D-16: best friends living on Cybertron.
“There is a youthfulness to this character, a brashness, a cockiness,” Hemsworth tells us of Orion Pax when we catch up with Australian actor at San Diego Comic-Con. “He’s not as self-assured, and all knowing and omnipresent, like the version we know and love, and became familiar with.”
That youthfulness gave Hemsworth a way to explore the character and make it his own, different from anything Cullen had done in the past. “I was really interested when the opportunity to tell an origin story between the relationship between these guys, and where they came from,” Hemsworth says. “They were friends before they became enemies. But also who they were before they became the figures we know and love.”
Of course, finding a different version of such a well-established character doesn’t come easy. Fortunately, the slow process of making a big cartoon movie gave Hemsworth plenty of time to refine Orion Pax.
“It was fun. It was a constant sort of adjustment,” he recalls. “It’s an interesting thing about animation. Unlike a film set [where] you’ll do your scene and walk away, and that’s kind of it, we get to record it and go, ‘Ah, it’s too much Optimus Prime’ or ‘it’s not enough.’ So we had to find that balance. We had a year of being in and out of the recording studio, and I think we landed in a good place.”
For producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the earlier setting helps Transformers One blaze its own path while preserving the stories that fans already know and love. “From the beginning we have followed the Hasbro lore,” Di Bonaventura assures Den of Geek. “The advantage we had with this story is that it takes place three billion years before anything else we’ve done, so you don’t really have to be beholden to it. Because we’re dealing with these young adults, or not fully formed adults, we’re able to hit into a subject matter that we never touched on before. And even in the lore there’s not much about it, so there was a creative freedom in that, which is really helpful to build really strong characters”
For Di Bonaventura, the lore provided a north star to guide the story. “It’s very clear why Megatron decides to take the approach he does, and why Optimus does. So you had that to lean into it, but the trick is to not let the characters show at the beginning any evidence of what they were going to become. And that was really hard.”
Despite the challenge, everyone involved with Transformers One feels confident about the results. They’re crafting their own characters. So even if Optimus Prime will eventually develop Peter Cullen’s signature gravel, Orion Pax is Chris Hemsworth’s character and has his own unique voice.
Transformers One rolls out to theaters on Sept. 20, 2024.
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