His expression was full of puzzlement and wonder, as if he was being reminded once again that he is part of something very dear to many people and he should not take a moment like this, even at a small film festival in Virginia, for granted.

The next morning, with a dollop of C-3PO’s familiar complaining in his English voice, Daniels says that J.J. Abrams, the director of the next Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker, had been texting him incessantly, asking him to voice a few lines. The film opens on December 20, but the tweaking continues.

Daniels groaned playfully: “He’s driving me nuts! He’s just like ‘Can you do this line?’ Sometimes it’s other lines. I said, ‘I’m busy, I’ll do it tomorrow.’ Then he goes into a sulk!”

Daniels looks and sounds a lot like C-3PO, sort of the way that dog owners and their dogs often merge: He’s trim, prim and nicely postured, with a crisp London accent, his words are exacting and his movements come across in a slightly haltering, self-conscious manner. The man is a human madeleine biscuit.

Ahead of the film’s opening, Daniels has released his memoir, I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story. It begins with the “Star Wars: In Concert” tour that took him through Chicago, which he says was the first time he truly understood the devotion to the series: night after night, he looked out into sold-out arenas and watched the faces, and “they got something I never got”.

Daniels maintained a long simmering animosity towards the series, “because of my original dismissal, if you will. It had been a slap in the face that took many years to disappear”.

This “dismissal”, which forms the sometimes lonesome spine of the book, is less a formal rejection than a suspicion that Daniels had felt in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, when the Star Wars Industrial Complex was first humming along and devouring pop culture. Because he was essentially faceless, because his body was hidden behind a mask and a gold robot costume, he believed that he was being written out of the glory bestowed on the series.

That hurt, “it’s still there,” he told me, “but it’s since been coloured by other things that have made all of this nicer”.

I Am C-3PO is not exactly a tell-all – indeed, Star Wars fans will not find a lot of new stuff here – but rather, it’s much more interesting, select notes from the margins of a cultural happening, as told by a man submerged inside a sweaty, stiff uncomfortable robot.

On Kenny Baker, the actor who was occasionally inside the R2-D2 suit (and died in 2016), Daniels writes coolly: “He appeared at countless conventions and the fans loved him. Sadly, our off-screen history prevented me from feeling the same.”

He recounts Lucas hating his initial performance (“Well, I … err … never thought of Threepio being a British butler”) and he recalls the production of the maligned prequels as bullying, inconsiderate and “industrial”, with “a sense of an oppressive management ethos coming from above.”

Daniels writes about what it was like being devoured, more or less, by C-3PO, though not always unpleasantly. The book is somewhat about how an actor develops an intense ownership over a character.

Daniels was one of the first actors cast for the original Star Wars, in 1975. He was primarily a stage actor, “but without Star Wars, without 3PO, I would have had a completely different life”, he said. “I am only now beginning to admit in public, I was a very mediocre actor. Average, to say the least. Wanting to act is not the same thing as being good, and I lucked out.”

And yet, in a way, it’s a role that transcends traditional acting. Whether he was a good or a bad C-3PO hardly matters. He was C-3PO, he gave the droid a reality, end of argument.

He says, at 73, “there are not that many years left” for him to do the character. He doesn’t want C-3PO “shoved into [any proposed future instalments] as a figurine”, but then he adds the ageless C-3PO is pretty good as connecting tissue between the original films and a new series, “so I would be there to do it – I think his days in the offshoots are far from over”.