Disney’s animated Tron: Uprising is set between the original 1982 film Tron and the 2010 sequel Tron: Legacy.
The series follows a young program named Beck (Elijah Wood) as he and Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) attempt to stop Clu (Fred Tatasciore), General Tessler (Lance Henriksen) and Paige (Emmanuelle Chriqui) from conquering the virtual world.
“I embodied [Tron] in the first place, and I’m going to be the only one who plays him and that’s it!” Boxleitner told reporters during a recent press conference covered by ComicBookResources.
“In the animated series, which I really love about this, the character is consistent in many ways but these new aspects come out — in this one he’s a harsh taskmaster and it gets harsher after this first episode. He really beats the daylight out of Beck, it’s really tough love. This guy is beat-up, battle-worn, and has much more maturity to him.”
Although Boxleitner has starred in additional genre films and TV shows over the years such as Babylon 5, the veteran actor says fans often prefer to relate to him as Tron.
“I do a lot of fan conventions, and I’d say 85 to 90 percent of the people who come up to me, it’s about Tron. Not about Babylon 5, not about anything else I’ve done, sci-fi or genre-wise, and that’s great. When it was initially happening after the original movie I was kind of perplexed by it, going, ‘Wow! You actually saw it?'”
“Years later I’d have people come up and say, ‘I saw Tron, Mr. Boxleitner, and I went into computer software, I went into something related to that,’ and I’m always thinking, ‘Wow, I was in something that influenced people, right down to one person’. You don’t really see that a lot in Hollywood. Not everyone is into Tron – but the ones that are? By God, they’re in all the way!”
Meanwhile, Lance Henriksen said he planned on using his theater background to flesh out the character of General Tessler, who is sent by Clu to harass Beck’s hometown of Argon City.
“Because I’ve been doing Richard III for years, I know what power’s like, I know what megalomaniacs are like because I certainly played some. I find that Tessler is so frustrated and twisted about the power that he wants and what he’s willing to do to do it, he’s very much like a megalomaniac politician or a Richard III,” Henriksen said.
“[Yes], Clu is really my enemy, but he’s my unspoken enemy. I would never relate that to Paige because that might be my undoing, I’d get derezzed like anybody else.”
Tron: Uprising goes live on Disney XD June 7 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on June 7.
