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(cars honking) (whistles blowing)
- My name is Andrew Pirozzi,
I play Sven in "Frozen".
Sven is Kristoff's trusty best friend.
The most lovable,
yet intuitive character that is on this journey,
for Anna's sake, to find her sister.
Sven is reliable, he knows the way.
He has intuitions and sensitivities to the environment
that humans don't necessarily have.
Sven is also just a lovable reindeer.
You're automatically drawn to his charm.
I prepared for playing Sven by studying my dog, Bella.
She is a 95 pound Great Dane, pit mix.
She's intuitive and she's always connected
and always staring at me, waiting
for whatever may come next.
And so I try to capture that essence
and take on that physicality.
Animals are always present.
To prepare for a show, mentally,
I generally like to meditate.
I like to get as present as possible.
By getting into the costumes, there's layers,
layer after layer.
So the first layer is to help reduce the amount of sweat,
that's like a set of tights.
And a dry shirt.
And we go through two of those a show, by the way.
The next part is padding.
Our knees are padded, elbows are padded, and arms.
I have to do about 40 to 45 minutes
of everything from cardio
all the way through like a full exercise series
from isometrics and then balancing and core work.
Just wanna make sure all the pistons
are firing at top notch.
I cannot feel what Sven actually feels on the outside,
however, in order to keep Sven alive,
it's important that it looks like that is the case.
To prepare for that, I have balls everywhere.
And it's all about reaction.
So I'll bounce the ball and catch it.
Stress balls.
Anything that essentially gets my reaction
to fire as quick as possible, that helps me
stay as aware as possible inside the puppet.
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We have shanks on our feet.
And the shanks are essentially Sven's hooves.
And those are a separate piece
than the actual external layer, which is the final part.
A plate on our back to help counter the puppet head.
Then we have the carapace, which is the body of Sven.
And then we have the gloves.
And then we have the head.
And front hooves, that's actually the last possible thing
to go on our body, because we lose access to our hands.
Okay, everything's functioning properly.
I'm ready for the show, and go, go, go.
On stage, Sven looks like a real reindeer,
which is interesting, because a lot of times
you can see the puppeteer or the actor.
Here we have a situation where nobody understands
that there's a human in there.
Ad I think that's wonderful for the imagination.
Michael Curry, who designed the puppet,
designed it with the implication that we can
completely trick the mind to believe
that there's an animal on stage.
The best thing about my job?
There's this escape moment inside the puppet
where I transcend the physicality of it.
And then there's this moment
when you can hear people's reactions
and I can only see sort of the first two rows.
What you see in people's eyes and what you can hear
in their breath is pretty amazing.
And so for me, that's the fun part.
Feeling the effect that I can have on the audience
and they don't even see who I am.
I think that's what's pretty impressive
and amazing about it, for me.
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