Well, Patrick Stewart Is Gonna Voice the Poop Emoji for ‘The Emoji Movie,’ Maya Rudolph Also Cast
Studios these days knows no bounds when it comes to anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The objects in The Emoji Movie aren’t even real — merely code-based pictograms that live on the surface of your phone screen. But that won’t stop Sony, determined to make you feel emotions for the very things meant to stand in for emotions in the first place. The cast is oddly good for a movie like this, and today it just got two new members: Patrick Stewart and Maya Rudolph.
Yes, you read that right, and you also read the title right, Sir Patrick Stewart OBE, who was knighted by the Queen in 2010 and played two of the most iconic characters in science fiction ever, has been cast as the poop emoji. We know this because the first line of The Hollywood Reporter’s article on the matter is: “Patrick Stewart is joining Sony Pictures Animation's The Emoji Movie as Poop.”
Good for him.
Maya Rudolph has also joined the bizarre project as Smiler, who we can probably all guess is one of the many smiley-faced emojis out there (the iPhone has 17!) It seems like these two have been added to the movie to, I dunno, make people more interested in seeing it? At least we can be happy for them and their nice fat paychecks.
At the SPA upcoming features presentation Wednesday morning, director Tony Leondis introduced the movie by saying, “I know what you’re thinking — WTF. What is their story? Emoji are expected to be one thing their whole lives. So I thought, what if one was born with not one, but lots of expressions ... and how would that affect the status quo. Everyone has felt different; it’s everyone’s story.” Sounds extremely Miles Finch to me.
The Emoji Movie unlocks the never-before-seen secret world inside your smartphone. Hidden within the messaging app is Textopolis, a bustling city where all your favorite emojis live, hoping to be selected by the phone’s user. In this world, each emoji has only one facial expression – except for Gene (T.J. Miller), an exuberant emoji who was born without a filter and is bursting with multiple expressions. Determined to become “normal” like the other emojis, Gene enlists the help of his handy best friend Hi-5 (James Corden) and the notorious code breaker emoji Jailbreak (Ilana Glazer). Together, they embark on an epic “app-venture” through the apps on the phone, each its own wild and fun world, to find the Code that will fix Gene. But when a greater danger threatens the phone, the fate of all emojis depends on these three unlikely friends who must save their world before it’s deleted forever.
The Emoji Movie hits theaters August 4.