Why a Robin Williams role needed a translator who could swear in four languages

Posted On November 11, 2025November 11, 2025

Some actors make funny movies, some actors make serious movies. Robin Williams could do both. Very few comedy stars could also win an Oscar, but that’s precisely what he did. He made people laugh, he made people cry, often within the space of the same scene. By the time the curtain fell on his extraordinary life and career, he had amassed a filmography quite unlike anyone else in the history of Hollywood. But how did he get there?

Movie fans might know that Williams began his career as a stand-up, but there’s a crucial step in between his debut behind the microphone and his box office domination. The funnyman’s first truly successful acting gig was as a backwards-ageing space alien. He played the titular Orkan on the sci-fi sitcom Mork and Mindy, which ran for four seasons in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Opposite Pam Dawber’s Mindy, Mork would try and assimilate into human culture, often falling wildly short of the mark.

Weirdly, Mork’s first appearance was on a very different show. He started out as a character in an episode of Happy Days. Inspired by the success of Star Wars, creator Garry Marshall came up with an episode in which an alien visits Arnold’s Drive-In. As Williams recalled in an interview with Pioneers of Television, the crew were auditioning a bunch of local comedians for the part. Not really caring if he got the part or not, he decided to have a bit of fun.

“I went in and basically just started talking in this weird kind of helium voice and sat on my head and started off just playing, just cause I said, ‘What have you got to lose?’” he said. “I got the gig and basically went in and had a good time.”

There is no way that “My Favourite Orkan” should have worked. Happy Days had previously been thoroughly grounded in reality. How was an alien going to fit into the same world as the Fonz and Richie Cunningham? Maybe it’s because the series had already literally jumped the shark by this point or because Williams was just so entertaining, but people adored it. The episode was so popular that, later that same year, Mork got his own show.

As countless directors and co-stars would come to learn over the next few decades, once you let Williams loose, it’s hard to rein him back in. His fun-loving attitude didn’t dissipate when he was given his own sitcom. He kept enjoying himself even when he was a national star, especially through the way Mork spoke. He invented an entirely new language for the extra-terrestrial, spawning such wonderful nonsense as “Na-Nu Na-Nu” or “Shazbot”. He also borrowed from several Earthly languages – particularly their swear words.

“Eventually, they had to have a censor who spoke, I think, Spanish – three or four different languages – because I was sneaking things in in different languages,” Williams admitted. “They went, ‘She knows what that means’ – ‘Really?’, oh, sad. We would try different things just to see what could get under the radar!”

Related Topics