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  • Star Wars - Attack of the Clones and Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith would both be infinitely better if a better actor than Hayden Christensen had been cast as Anakin Skywalker.

    I also think Mads Mikkelsen was a terrible, awful replacement for Johnny Depp as Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts 3. He's such a wooden actor and lacks the subtlety and nuance that Depp brought to the role.

    • In regards to Star Wars, I remember watching the behind the scenes documentary on the Phantom Menace DVD where you get to see them auditioning child actors for the part of Anakin.

      Specifically, you watch them screen test the final three kids, one of which is obviously Jake Lloyd.

      In my opinion he was second place of the three, I could never understand why George chose him.

      • Poor Jake Lloyd had a really tough time in life because of his involvement in Star Wars, sadly.

        I think HC was only cast because he was a stereotypically hot guy, TBH. His acting is just atrocious all the way through. (Though he's acquitted himself way better in the new series as Anakin and Vader.)

        • There's also a very real problem of Lucas not really caring to get the best out of them, and for the younger actors it's disastrous. Natalie Portman is generally a bit better at picking solid projects than elevating them (IMHO), but she's every bit as bad as the Anakins in the prequels. Only the veterans who could draw on prior experience, and especially the British-trained theater actors, could work with the abstractions of the set and chew the scenery convincingly without a lot of helpful guidance.

          On ANH, George was still a young Turk in naturalistic New Hollywood, and anyway he had exactly one mainstream success under his belt, so people could push back; there's also the sometimes exaggerated but very real contributions of the editing team picking good takes and splicing them together in a way that feels right, certainly in the moment. On ESB he did his best work by going with scriptwriters and a veteran director who'd done a dozen films. Even on ROTJ, the non-guild director was a guy who'd done a lot of intimate character work on British TV, and if the plot was straining under its weight, you still got solid line readings and some convincing emotion.

      • I don't think George has ever had an eye for good actors. He just got lucky with Harrison Ford who carried the shit out of the original trilogy.

    • Star Wars - Attack of the Clones and Star Wars - Revenge of the Sith would both be infinitely better if a better actor than Hayden Christensen had been cast as Anakin Skywalker.

      I really think George Lucas as director was the problem there. Hayden Christiansen isn’t a terrible actor. Neither is Natalie Portman or Ewan McGregor. But all three of them have just terrible, awful line reads in those movies.

      Portman’s career took a hit from those movies, though she recovered because she already had a foothold in the industry. McGregor was a well-known actor already, so he wasn’t hurt. Christiansen got demolished.

      A bad actor makes themself look bad. A bad director makes every actor look bad.

108 comments