Carolyn Lawrence still learning about SpongeBob's Sandy Cheeks

LOS ANGELES, July 31 (UPI) -- Voice actor Carolyn Lawrence said the SpongeBob SquarePants spinoff movie Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, premiering Friday on Netflix, taught her new things about her title character.

Lawrence, 57, has been voicing Cheeks, SpongeBob's scientist squirrel friend, since the show premiered on Nickelodeon in 1999.

"I'm learning as the fans are learning," Lawrence told UPI in a recent Zoom interview. "So it's really fun for me to learn more about her 25 years in."

In Saving Bikini Bottom, the evil scientist Sue Nahmee (Wanda Sykes) digs up SpongeBob and Sandy's home to transport it to her water park. So, Sandy leads SpongeBob to Texas to get Bikini Bottom back.

Along the way, Sandy reunites with her squirrel family, voiced by Craig Robinson, Grey Griffin and Johnny Knoxville. Lawrence said meeting the Cheeks family illuminated where Sandy got her curious, daredevil personality.

"This was the first I had known of her family," Lawrence said. "I didn't know her full background."

Director Liza Johnson is new to the SpongeBob world and animation. On both fronts, Johnson said the SpongeBob team was always available to provide references.

Johnson said she was impressed by how much detail went into portraying SpongeBob, a talking sea sponge who wears pants.

"Every person that works at Nickelodeon can tell you about exactly how porous he is and how many holes that means on what part of his face," she said. "The knowledge is really accumulated."

When Sandy and SpongeBob leave the ocean, they remain animated. However, they traverse live-action backgrounds of rocks and deserts.

The SpongeBob movies have a history of incorporating live action. David Hasselhoff gave SpongeBob and Patrick a ride on his back in the 2004 movie and Keanu Reeves appeared in a tumbleweed in 2020's Sponge on the Run.

Though the backgrounds represent the Texas desert, Johnson filmed them in New Mexico. Still, Johnson said the locations tied in with the film's theme of ocean displacement.

"I found ammonites of petrified sea creatures because that desert was the ocean floor in the past," she said. "I am actually on the ocean floor. It's just dry now. That was amazing."

The film also features two new songs, sung by Sandy. Lawrence said she sang in the Big Walnut High School choir while growing up in Ohio, but never trained in music.

"Then you're thrown into a situation where suddenly you're playing a squirrel and she gets to sing," she said. "Then, I have no choice but to rise to the occasion."

Lawrence said she practiced her two songs at home with the 13-year-old daughter.

"I'm grateful that my oldest daughter was singing with me and helping me because even in my living room alone, I'm nervous," Lawrence said. "Nobody's even watching and I'm afraid to do it."

Johnson said a movie combining animation and live action was not such a drastic departure from her previous work. She directed the dramas Hateship Loveship and Elvis & Nixon and episodes of the television shows The Last of Us, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Barry and more.

When it came to combining animation and live-action, Johnson said she relied on her experience with visual effects, or VFX for short. Shows like Last of Us, American Horror Story, and the comedy What We Do in the Shadows incorporate elements that are not on set with the actors.

"Even for Wanda, just telling her, 'OK, there's a squirrel down your shirt. OK, it's going around your back,'" Johnson said. "Just giving people something to respond to is exactly the same as you would do in any live-action VFX shoot."

Lawrence has experienced a 25-year SpongeBob journey, which is set to continue with another SpongeBob-centric movie and a Plankton spinoff.

She credited the late SpongeBob creator Stephen Hillenburg, who died in 2018, with assembling a team of actors and creators who would stand the test of time.

"He cast us more as the people we are," she said. "He truly saw things that we would bring to the characters, maybe that we didn't even know we had. We have grown together."