What it feels like to take second billing in Transformers sequel, after a big metal alien

SINGAPORE – In the posters for Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, it is clear who the stars are – the mecha-beings from space take centre stage, while the human characters are tiny and off to the side.

The young and relatively unknown actors taking the human lead roles, Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, say they are happy to be in the strange position of getting billed as lead actors when, in reality, they play second fiddle to computer-generated creatures.

“It’s nice to be in a billion-dollar franchise, and being a human means there’s less pressure on us,” Ramos says, referring to the load on the backs of the animation, visual-effects and voice-acting teams, whose job is to make the metallic beings come to life.

The 31-year-old and his fellow Americans – actress Fishback, 32, and actor-rapper Tobe Nwigwe, 36 – were speaking as a group to journalists at the Sands Expo & Convention Centre two weeks ago.

The actors, along with director Steven Caple Jr and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, were in Singapore to promote the seventh and latest instalment of the Transformers movie franchise.

Fishback says she has been a fan of the cartoon versions of the Transformers on television and in the movies since she was a child. In the new movie, her fandom and ambition as an actress come together.

“Humans are second to the Transformers in the movies. But there can only be a certain number of humans in the movie and there are so many actors in the world, but it got to be us,” she says.

Nwigwe offers a shot of show-business wisdom, saying: “Second billing is better than no billing.”

Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts opens in cinemas on Thursday.

In the film, Ramos and Fishback play Noah and Elena, two New Yorkers who, during the 1990s, discover the existence of the Transformers, a race of metallic aliens stranded on Earth. There are factions engaged in a planetary war.

Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen), a senior member of the Autobot faction, brings the humans into contact with the Maximals, a faction that have adopted animal disguises. They include the falcon-shaped Airazor (voiced by Michelle Yeoh) and gorilla-shaped Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman).

Ramos and Fishback say that despite being overshadowed by their co-stars, they serve an indispensable function – they have to help make the unreal feel real.

Ramos says his Noah is the average Joe introducing the viewers to giants such as Mirage, voiced by comedian-actor Pete Davidson. He plays Mirage as a chatty, streetwise resident of New York.

Mirage and Noah, as native New Yorkers, share an immediate bond. Noah’s shock at seeing that a silver Porsche has turned into a talking humanoid quickly gives way to acceptance.

“You see Noah and Mirage meet for the first time. They make a fist bump. They make a connection,” says Ramos.

The Mirage-Noah scene was created by first capturing Ramos doing his part. Davidson then voiced his part in reaction to Ramos’ performance.

At another conference, director Caple Jr, 35, reveals that Davidson wanted Mirage to be a comedy junkie who absorbed the zany energy of his favourite funnymen.

“Davidson wanted to pay homage to the 1990s – there’s a little bit of Jim Carrey, from his movie The Mask (1994). There is a bit of Adam Sandler. Davidson wanted that level of comedy in the film. He wanted to play off Anthony’s innocent look, the look of someone who has just seen a talking car,” Caple Jr adds.

New characters, new battles in Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts

The seventh movie in the franchise comes after the 1980s events of the previous film, Bumblebee (2018).

According to producer di Bonaventura, because of its setting, the new movie can be considered a prequel to the main five-movie sequence (2007 to 2017) directed by action master Michael Bay.

The new movie brings more television Transformers lore into the cinema realm. The film’s engine is the Beast Wars storyline, which comes from a 1990s animated television series of the same name.

Here are more elements that will be familiar to fans, but new to the cinema franchise.

The movie reintroduces Optimus Prime as an Autobot who has yet to trust humans.

“He’s different from the character fans remember. We’re watching him grow up as a leader,” says di Bonaventura at the Singapore press event.

The Maximals, the faction that turns into animal-shaped creatures, are introduced, along with their enemies, the Terrorcons, who are allied to the chief villains of the Transformers series, the Decepticons.

American actor Peter Dinklage voices one Terrorcon member, Scourge, a being who turns into a truck.

The movie unveils Unicron, a planet-devouring entity much more powerful than the previously seen Megatron and the rest of the Decepticon horde.

Unicron controls the Terrorcons. His planet-gobbling desires could mean the end of both Earth and the Autobots’ home planet, Cybertron.

For the first time, a human character will be able to fight alongside the Autobots. As can be seen in the trailer, Noah is wearing an exosuit, an armoured, gun-equipped shell. How he gets the exosuit, a device first seen in the television series, is meant to be a movie surprise.

The Maximals: Transformers with real moving faces

Those familiar with the cinema franchise will see all Transformers as angular, mechanical entities, whether they are in two-armed and two-legged humanoid form, or disguised as cars, trucks or aircraft.

The Maximals, however, are animal-shaped. The nearly 4m-tall metallic silverback gorilla called Optimus Primal, for example, has biological features, such as fur.

He, along with other Maximals – such as the cheetah-shaped Cheetor (Tongayi Chirisa), white rhinocerous Rhinox (David Sobolov) and the peregrine falcon Airazor – are refugees who have adopted animal disguises on Earth because the planet-eating Unicron has made a meal of their home world.

Speaking to The Straits Times, director Caple Jr says that Primal the gorilla had to display a far greater range of expressions than the standard Autobots, which have armoured faces that betray little movement.

“We had to figure out how to turn a gorilla’s face into metal. That took a lot of time and attention to detail,” he adds.

He says the graphics team split the face into myriad slivers so the mouth and eyebrows could move expressively, without taking away the fact that this is a metal being disguised as a gorilla.

“His nose flares at emotional moments. We had to put slices into his nose so it could move realistically. Later, we came back and added more cuts,” he says.