Expressive animatronics usually requires a team of puppeteers to jointly move a single character from an off-stage location, making eye-contact with human scene partners virtually impossible. Aiming to solve this problem, a hybrid-control system was developed for Stan Winston Studios for their robotic film characters. It employs an infrared pupil tracker and inverse kinematics to achieve real-time, robust, and realistic gaze selection with a single puppeteer and optional director override.