Shhhh...the Real Stars of "Passengers" are a Robot and a Spaceship

Meet the true stars of the movie Passengers: the starship Avalon, with its plasma-shield generator sticking out like a stinger, and robot bartender Arthur, played by Michael Sheen (here with Chris Pratt). Credit: 2016 Columbia Pictures Industries By now you've probably seen those soulful faces staring out at you from the ads for the new movie Passengers: Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt playing Aurora Land and Jim Preston, two would-be interplanetary colonists who wake up from hibernation way, way too early. They drive the film's plot and bestow the whole project with a glowy, Hollywood-blockbuster sheen. But the film's real stars are less familiar, less visible, and distinctly more intriguing. One of the standout characters is Arthur, a robotic bartender played with Turing Test verve by Welsh actor Michael Sheen. The other is the ship itself: the Avalon, an automated interstellar cruise liner bringing 5,000 settlers to a new world...assuming they arrive intact. Arthur and the Avalon explore well-worn ideas about space exploration, machine autonomy, and artificial intelligence in fresh and engaging ways. As a result, there is a lot more to Passengers than meets the eye. What is most striking about both Arthur and the Avalon is how much thought went into them. I spoke with Michael Sheen and Passengers director Morten Tyldum to find out about how they brought their visions of future technology to the screen. Tyldum, who previously directed the Alan Turing film The Imitation Game, clearly has been doing a lot of pondering about AI and the limits of computing. He also wanted to get the technical details of spaceflight plausibly correct, so his Avalon is restricted to Einstein-approved, slower-than-light travel. And he filled Passengers with sly homages to Stanley Kubrick: not just the expected 2001 but also the Kubrick-inspired AI: Artificial Intelligence and, more surprising, The Shining. But enough of me. Let's hear directly from Michael Sheen and Morten Tyldum. (Warning: There are some mild spoilers ahead.) First off, Michael Sheen.How do you find inspiration for playing a robot? Michael Sheen: With this role there were two major elements. One is that there is a tradition on film of the British-accented robot on a spaceship who may or may not fuck things up for everybody. We were playing off that tradition, being aware of that. But on the other hand, we were starting from the point of view of, what is the function of this robot, what was he created to do? He was programmed to be the best bartender in the world…or in space.