Orson Welles on his bizarre role in the ‘Transformers’ movie
Few directors of the 20th century had the same mammoth influence on cinema as Orson Welles, with the iconic filmmaker rubbing shoulders with the industry’s very best minds, including Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, John Ford and Billy Wilder. As well as an icon behind the camera, he was also a magnetising figure on screen too, appearing in such films as Moby Dick, Casino Royale, Catch-22 and the 1958 film Touch of Evil, which he also directed.
No project is as iconic in Welles’ filmography as his influential 1941 movie, Citizen Kane, however, with critics long hailing the flick as an all-time best. Directed by and starring Welles, the Oscar-winning movie and ‘Best Picture’ nominee tells the story of a publishing tycoon whose life is reflected upon whilst reporters try to solve the mystery of his last breath and final word: “Rosebud”.
An iconic face in mid-20th-century cinema, Welles became sought after by a number of other filmmakers, including Alejandro Jodorowsky, who wanted the actor for his tragically unrealised Dune movie. Alongside Welles, other icons, such as Salvador Dalí, Mick Jagger, Gloria Swanson and Udo Kier, were also wanted for the project, which was due to be one of the most eccentric films of the 20th century.
Aside from Jodorowsky’s Dune adaptation that never came to light, Welles also featured in a number of other surprising projects, with none being as strange as the 1986 animation The Transformers: The Movie. Lending his voice to the project alongside a number of other surprisingly established names, including Leonard Nimoy, Norman Alden and Robert Stack, Welles played Unicron, the cartoon villain of the film that takes the form of a planet.
In fact, Welles wasn’t snobby about the roles he took on, taking almost any project that came his way. As he stated to a biographer: “Nobody in the world has acted in as many bad films as I have…I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one thing to another…I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed…I tear myself apart on the screen”.
The Transformers movie would be one of Welles’ very final roles, appearing only in Hot Money in 1986 and Someone to Love a year later, with both being released two years after his death in 1985. With this being considered, there’s something very cool about the fact that the actor’s final words in the Transformers flick are “destiny…you cannot destroy my destiny,” giving fans one last nugget of cinematic greatness to chow down on before his passing.
Check out a clip of Welles in The Transformers: The Movie below.
