Deep Roy has spent five decades under prosthetics, inside puppets and behind other actors, and the one part everybody knows asked him to be the same man 165 times over. That he made it look like one performance rather than a trick is the achievement.
Fi1m perspective
The Oompa-Loompas in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) come out in ranks, identical and deadpan, and every one of them is Deep Roy. He performed each one separately and the takes were combined afterwards, so that when a dozen of them kick in unison it is one man agreeing with himself across a dozen afternoons. Roy has said Burton told him the Oompas were programmed like robots, "like a regiment; they do the same steps", and that is what is on screen: not a crowd but a drill. He plays it with a straight face and a slight lift of the chin that reads as pride in the work. It is the best joke in a film we found handsome and cold.
It was the most visible thing he had done, nearly thirty years in. Roy began as a stand-up on the British club circuit in 1970 and reached the screen in 1976, in The New Avengers and The Pink Panther Strikes Again, then spent the eighties and nineties mostly out of sight: creature parts, puppeteering, stunt work and uncredited doubling, including standing in for Yoda on The Empire Strikes Back. He was Droopy McCool in Return of the Jedi (1983) and rode the racing snail as Teeny Weeny in The NeverEnding Story (1984). The name on the credits was rarely his. The work was.
Burton changed that. Planet of the Apes (2001) put him in ape make-up; Big Fish (2003) gave him Mr Soggybottom and a face; then came the factory, and a voice in Corpse Bride the same year. From 2009 he was Keenser, Scotty's small silent assistant opposite Simon Pegg across the three Star Trek films, a named character who comes back, which in this career counts as promotion.
What he does is precision under constraint. The Oompa-Loompa numbers are choreographed in a different borrowed style each time, and Roy hits the same mark in every pass so the joins never show. We grinned at the first one. By the third we had stopped listening to Dahl's verses, partly because Danny Elfman's arrangements bury them and partly because we were hunting for the seam between one Roy and the next, and we never found it. That is the limit as well as the strength. The role is built to be looked at rather than listened to, and so is almost everything he has done: fifty years on screen and hardly any of it is a scene in which Deep Roy talks to somebody.
The complaint that his reputation rests on one job is fair, and it misses what the job proves. Most actors are asked to be one person convincingly. He was asked to be a hundred and sixty-five and to make none of them stand out, and he did it. If a film ever gives him a chair, a name and three pages of dialogue, we would like to see what he does with them. Nobody has been in a hurry to find out.
Biography
Deep Roy, also credited as Mohinder Purba or Gurdeep Roy, is a Kenyan-British actor, stuntman and puppeteer. Born Mohinder Purba on 26 January 1949 in Nairobi, Kenya, to Indian parents, he moved to England as a child and began his career there as a stand-up comedian after briefly studying accounting.
He made his screen debut in the 1970s with roles in television series including The New Avengers, Doctor Who and Blake's 7, and films such as The Pink Panther Strikes Again. Roy is known for his work in science fiction and fantasy, including Droopy McCool in Return of the Jedi (1983), all 165 Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and the recurring role of Keenser in the Star Trek films (2009–2016). He has frequently collaborated with director Tim Burton and appeared in other productions such as The NeverEnding Story (1984) and Corpse Bride (2005).
