#jarjarbinks

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Speaking with the New York Times, actor Ahmed Best looks back at his time as the initially awkward and later pivotal Gungan Jar Jar Binks, a period of his career that was instantly life-changing but which also took a huge toll on him personally. "It took almost a mortal toll on me. It was too much. It was the first time in my life where I couldn't see the future. I didn't see any hope. Here I was at 26 years old, living my dream, and my dream was over. Ahmed also touched on the subject of Jar Jar - and other Phantom characters - accents. "Everybody talks about Jar Jar's accent. I read exactly what George wrote. It wasn't me. It wasn't an accent. Back in the day, Chewbacca was seen as the Black character, and then Yoda was ridiculed for being an Asian stereotype. Then the Neimoidians were ridiculed for being an Asian stereotype. 'Star Wars' has had a history of being a lightning rod. That's because it's so successful." Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith stepped back from featuring Jar Jar as a lead character, relegating his appearances to cameos (however pivotal they may be in Sith especially) and that had an impact on Best. "As an artist you want the respect from your peers, and I felt as if I was being scaled back because I didn't do a good job. It really hurt. Everybody was running away from me, including the people that I gave two years of my life to." Thankfully, for the saga and the smart (and far, far larger) percentage of the fandom who very much appreciated his contribution and efforts Ahmed did indeed return to the GFFA, and along with the long-overdue gratitude of the fandom he also felt something he might not have expected to just a few years before. "This is going to sound really corny, please forgive me, but it felt like coming home." [amazon box="0593723090"]

While the clear focus of the interview is on the relentless negativity that bombarded Ahmed Best after his history-making performance as Jar Jar Binks, a barrage that brought the actor to the lowesr possible ebb, there is also the fact that his work on the Gungan general changed the face of digital cinema, a contribution that is still felt today as Ahmed explains. “I was an enormous Star Wars fan as a kid,” says Best, speaking from LA (the Hollywood actors’ strike doesn’t apply to documentary podcasts). “I loved it so much that my mom went to the fabric store and made Star Wars pillowcases for us, Star Wars sheets, Star Wars clothes.” A couple of decades later, the actor and martial artist was performing with percussive dance troupe Stomp. After one show, he was approached by a casting director who wanted him to audition for a role. When he found out it would be at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch the next day, it blew his mind. “I didn’t know what was happening,” says Best. “I thought it was a prank.” He turned up, walked through a faux-Victorian mansion filled with display cases containing original lightsabers, and was asked to try out for a role in new Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace – which involved acting like a salamander. He got the part as Jar Jar Binks’s body – the basis for the CGI animations that formed the character – only to talk the production into giving him a spoken role, using a voice he’d previously invented to entertain his young cousins. Soon, he was on set with Hollywood megastars, driving around with George Lucas – who became almost a mentor to him – and filming a role that effectively invented motion capture. “We were doing something that was going to change cinema history,” says Best, of a collaboration with visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic that meant they had to create new programmes to capture what he was doing. This was the first time CGI had been used to generate a major movie character that spoke and interacted as though it were human. “Even the software was written on my body,” says Best. “There’s still that legacy code in CGI packages today. My physical DNA is in every single CGI character since.” Read the full interview, where Ahmed details his very public worst times, but also be very aware that the work Best did was groundbreaking, innovative, important and paved the path for his triumphant return as Kelleran Beq in The Mandalorian season 3. [amazon box="B0C5YWBSHR"]

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