During an interview with GoldDerby.com, Alan Tudyk has confirmed that he will not be reprising the role of Heihei in the 2026 live-action remake of Moana, a role he made famous in the Oscar-nominated 2016 original and its box-office-record-breaking 2024 sequel.
“Heihei will be played by someone else,” Tudyk confirms to Gold Derby during a conversation about his Emmy-nominated voiceover role in the Disney+ series Andor. The actor adds that the “someone else” will be a female performer whose casting has yet to be revealed. “Everybody calls Heihei a chicken, even though he’s a rooster,” Tudyk jokes. “So it’s about time they got an actress to put a little more ‘chick’ in the chicken.”
The live-action Moana is directed by Thomas Kail, frequent collaborator of Oscar-nominated Moana songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is back onboard the franchise after sitting out Moana 2. Dwayne Johnson is also reprising his role as that demigod with the good hair, Maui, while newcomer Catherine Laga’aia is playing the seafaring wayfinder Moana — a character originated by Auliʻi Cravalho.
Tudyk makes it clear that there are no hard feelings about not being asked back as Heihei, noting that Disney generally likes to preserve a church and state-style divide between its animated films and their live-action counterparts. “I do Disney animation,” he says about his prolific presence across the studio’s many animated favorites ranging from Big Hero 6 and Frozen to Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia. “They keep putting me in ’em, so I’ll keep doing ’em!”
While Tudyk’s Disney animation work is mainly recording booth-based, his Star Wars duties as reformed Imperial droid K-2SO have required him to don a motion-capture suit for the character’s appearances in Rogue Oneand Andor. And the actor jokes that one silver lining about not being asked back for the live action Moana is avoiding having to bring Heihei kicking and clawing into the mo-cap era.
“I bet the new Heihei has to do [mo-cap],” says Tudyk, who had another recent mo-cap role in James Gunn’s Superman as one of the Fortress of Solitude robots. “I did motion-capture for Superman and Krypto was played by a young girl [Murphy Reed] who was jumping around on her knees in a mo-cap suit. I kept thinking, ‘I fear for your knees!'”
“So I’m a no to doing motion-capture for animals,” Tudyk adds about how far he’ll go for beloved Disney cartoon characters like Heihei. “That’s a tough one.”
Stream Tudyk as K-2SO in Andor on Disney+ now.
