A recent video posted online by Sony Pictures Animation, the production company behind such kid-friendly animated mega-hits as The Smurfs and Hotel Transylvania, has revealed that T.J. Miller is the first to join the cast of Emojimovie: Express Yourself. In the video, Miller auditions for a role in the movie by testing out his best emoji impressions on the casting director, but eventually realizes that he may have been fed some false details about the project. See it below…
The actor and comedian will be lending his voice to play “Gene, who was supposed to be a “meh” emoji like his parents. However, the optimistic character has a glitch that causes him to have multiple expressions outside of his control.” From there, in his quest to be a single emotion emoji, it sounds like he will learn to accept his abnormality as more of a blessing than a curse.
To say that Miller has been having a good 2016 would be quite the understatement seeing as how over the past six and a half months, Miller has starred in Deadpool, one of the highest-grossing films of the year, earned praise once again for his work in season 3 of Silicon Valley, which received a season 4 renewal, and was cast in Steven Spielberg’s sure-to-be-successful Ready Player One. There has been no shortage of work in Hollywood for Miller since 2008, and his talent as a comedian, which obviously transfers over to him as an actor, has led him to get roles in Cloverfield, How to Train Your Dragon, Get Him to the Greek, Transformers: Age of Extinction and more.
Emojimovie: Express Yourself, has garnered quite a bit of (mostly negative) attention since its initial announcement earlier this year, as the very idea of basing a film off of emojis, the icons used in text messaging around the world, on the surface, comes across as a studio cashing in on a worldwide phenomenon. Then again, a movie like The LEGO Movie, which every major studio must be trying to emulate considering its success, didn’t necessarily try to convince the audience that the LEGO brand wasn’t what brought them to the theater, but embraced the premise and simply let the movie speak for itself. As a result, Warner Bros. released a quality movie that was universally loved by all and launched a franchise.
Emojimovie: Express Yourself is being directed by Tony Leondis and will hit theaters on August 11th, 2017.
Source: Variety
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Originally published July 18, 2016. Updated April 15, 2018.
