ONE-MAN SHOW.(The Talk of the Town; actor Deep Roy plays all Oompa Loompas in Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" )

Early on in Roald Dahl's book "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," Grandpa Joe lets Charlie in on a secret: late at night, an army of tiny "secret workers"--Oompa Loompas--can be seen plugging away behind Mr. Wonka's gates. Last year, a similar air of enigma surrounded Pinewood Studios, near London, where the director Tim Burton was filming an adaptation of the book. Unbeknownst to the world's Oompa Loompa watchers, he had hired the actor Deep Roy to play every last one of the workers. (Mel Stuart, in his 1971 version, used ten dwarfs.) In a series of Busby Berkeleyesque production numbers, Roy, with the help of digital technology, is refracted into a sort of kaleidoscopic one-man corps de ballet. Inscrutable hybrids of Punjab and Marvin the Martian, their hair sculpted to resemble chocolate kisses, Roy's Oompa Loompas are the film's comic engine. An uninformed moviegoer could be forgiven for wondering, in the manner of Charlie, "But, Grandpa, who, who is Mr. Burton using to do all the work in the factory?"

"My family had to sign releases; I didn't tell anybody," Roy recalled the other day from his home in Santa Monica. "But then word leaked out that there's only one man playing all Loompas." One man, all Loompas: it takes some getting used to. But Roy, who was born in Nairobi to Indian parents (he's descended from a maharaja) and has been acting for more than thirty years (his resume includes roles in "Planet of the Apes," "Return of the Jedi," and "Poltergeist II"), was up to the job. As the Loompas, he sings, disco-dances, smashes guitars, and swims synchronically; he's a chef, a barber, a shrink, a secretary, and exactly one hundred and twenty-one other things. "People were asking me who were going to be the other Oompas, and I said to them, 'I don't know,' " Roy recalled.

The idea, originally, was that Roy would have some help either from child actors or from what he called "some small, special ladies." When that didn't work (fatigue and bustlines, respectively), Roy volunteered to take on their duties. "I said, 'Let me do it all myself.' They said, 'Are you sure?' And I said, 'Yeah. It's easy!' "

Actually, becoming all the Loompas was an exhaustive process. First, Burton called for a ...