#AS KELLERAN AND JAR JAR | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

thehollowprince · 6 months ago

Text

The Actor Who Played Jar Jar Binks Is Proud of His ‘Star Wars’ Legacy

Ahmed Best recalls the painful backlash to the “Phantom Menace” character that was considered a racial stereotype at the time but is now embraced by fans.

Ahmed Best is a futurist, an educator, a martial artist, a writer-director, and the actor behind Jar Jar Binks, the most hated character in the “Star Wars” universe.

Long-eared Jar Jar is a bipedal amphibianlike creature with an ungainly walk and a winning attitude. The groundbreaking, computer-generated goofball debuted in the first installment of George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” and instantly set off widespread criticism from both fans and the press.

“It took almost a mortal toll on me. It was too much,” Best recently recalled. “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.”

Now 50, Best is the picture of panache who could easily be mistaken for an off-duty rock star. He arrived at our interview, riding a motorcycle and wearing a blue denim jacket, black jeans, and stylish shades.

In the presence of Best’s self-assured demeanor, it’s even more shocking to learn that back in 1999, the vitriol fans flung at Jar Jar and, in turn, at him, ravaged his mental health. But he revisited these memories a few weeks before the movie’s return to theaters on Friday to commemorate the 25th anniversary of its release.

Two constellations, “Star Wars” and “Star Trek,” nurtured Best’s curiosity for both science and the arts as a child in the South Bronx. The 1977 “Star Wars” (Episode IV) was the first movie he ever saw in a cinema. Back then, being part of the intergalactic saga seemed unfathomable.

Twenty years later, Best was performing in “Stomp,” the theater show where performers communicate through rhythm and acrobatics, when Robin Gurland, the casting director on “Phantom Menace,” attended a performance in San Francisco. She had spent months conducting an exhaustive search for the actor who could embody Jar Jar’s physicality. That evening, she found him.

“There was just something so electrifying about his performance; it was natural and innovative,” Gurland said by phone. “I couldn’t take my eyes off of Ahmed.”

“What if you were from this other planet, totally different from anything we know? How would you move?” Gurland recalled asking Best during his audition at Skywalker Ranch. “He got it immediately and was able to just create this being out of thin air.”

Doug Chiang, the design director on “Phantom Menace,” remembered Lucas describing Jar Jar as a combination of the silent comedy stars Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Lucas ruled out a puppet for the alien creature, Chiang said, but still needed Jar Jar to appear grounded in reality to hold up against live actors onscreen.

“Even though this was a synthetic character, created out of ones and zeros, George wanted it to have a lot of expression,” Chiang said via video call. “The actor component was absolutely critical.”

Commonplace now, motion capture, the process of recording a person or object’s movement to serve as the basis for a digital entity, was mostly uncharted territory. Jar Jar became the first main character in a feature film created this way, though initially, the filmmakers didn’t know if it would work.

When Best landed the part as well as the separate assignment to voice the character — providing a playful take he often used with his younger cousins — he thought “it was surreal,” he recalled, adding with a laugh, “I was like, ‘Why me?’ I wanted it, of course, and I’m glad George believed in me, a 23-year-old kid from the streets of New York.”

In Chiang’s view, “Ahmed’s role in this was very understated, and it’s heartbreaking that he didn’t receive the attention and accolade because Jar Jar was a breakthrough character.”

Best spent the better part of two years working with Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic; his acting provided the physical element for the foundational software Lucasfilm created for performance capture. “I’m not Jar Jar. We are Jar Jar,” Best said, crediting the numerous artists involved at different stages of the character’s development.

But during filming, Best had doubts about the role. He credits co-star Ewan McGregor, who played Obi-Wan Kenobi, with helping him embrace Jar Jar’s inherent silliness. Best was on set with the rest of the cast, performing while wearing a suit and headpiece that resembled Jar Jar’s final look

“In one of the first scenes we shot, I was having a hard time with the line ‘Weesa going home!’ because it didn’t feel right to me,” Best recalled. “And then Ewan said, ‘But how does it feel to Jar Jar?’ That’s when I thought, ‘I’m going to take my ego out of this.’”

When he saw the final rendering of Jar Jar onscreen, he was taken aback. “I was up there, and I wasn’t up there at the exact same time,” Best said. “Jar Jar moved like me, and that was just a very odd feeling.”

Unfortunately, Jar Jar was a pioneering character in more ways than one. Critics said the character was a collection of racial stereotypes, “a Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit,” as The Wall Street Journal described him. One complaint was Jar Jar’s accent, which some perceived as derived from Jamaican patois.

“Everybody talks about Jar Jar’s accent,” said Best, who is of West Indian descent. “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,” he continued. “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.”

No matter the context, the onslaught of negative reactions in the nascent online forums of the late ’90s, as well as in traditional media, drove him to consider suicide, he said.

Looking back now, Best said Jar Jar “was probably also the first cyber-bullied pop culture character ever.” In his view there were other factors that contributed to the barrage, including racism among fans, something another “Star Wars” performer, Kelly Marie Tran, called out in 2018 when she endured online harassment. (He said he related to “Kelly Marie for sure. She’s a phenomenal actor” and the way she was treated was “completely unwarranted.”)

“There are a lot of people who want to see Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Darth Vader for the rest of their lives, and they don’t realize that ‘Star Wars’ is changing,” Best said. He noted that the “Star Wars” franchise had yet to have a movie centered on a Black protagonist and added with a laugh, “I’m available.”

But worse than the ceaseless public scrutiny was learning that his role had been dramatically reduced for the two sequels, “Attack of the Clones” and “Revenge of the Sith.”

“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,” he said. “It really hurt. Everybody was running away from me, including the people that I gave two years of my life to.”

Finding acting work post-“Star Wars” proved nearly impossible. The first hurdle was proving he had been in the movies: “When I’d tell people what I did as Jar Jar, they would be like, ‘That’s just animation. I don’t see your face, so how do I know it was you?’” Best recalled. “And I’d say, ‘No, it was me. I’m an actor; it’s called motion capture.”

He admitted that even all these years later he remained hesitant to talk with journalists about that time. “It’s such a cultural phenomenon, and there are few Black voices in ‘Star Wars,’ so I feel that I’m partially obliged to keep my voice out there,” he said.

Since those dark days, Best has diversified his ambitions. He’s an adjunct lecturer at the University of Southern California’s School of Dramatic Arts, where he teaches filmmaking for actors. At Stanford University’s d.school, he has taught a class revolving around Afrofuturism, a subject that informs his belief that an optimistic future is possible through the combination of narrative art and technology.

“Jar Jar represents the possibility that whatever you got in your head, creatively, we can invent a future where this thing exists,” he said. “Just because no one has done it before, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

Throughout the years, Jar Jar hasn’t entirely left Best’s life. The actor has voiced the character in video games and in animated shows like “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.”

“It’s big, and it tends to overtake your life,” Best said. “The thoughts I’ve had were, ‘Who am I outside of this?’ Because as an artist, you don’t want to be locked into one thing.”

More recently, he’s rejoined the “Star Wars” universe in his own body, as the warrior teacher Kelleran Beq on the children’s show “Jedi Temple Challenge” and in an episode of “The Mandalorian.”

“This is going to sound really corny, please forgive me, but it felt like coming home,” Best said.

Despite the baggage, Best never stopped loving Jar Jar. When he meets fans — on the rare occasions that he agrees to appear at conventions — Best has noticed it’s usually young children, people with disabilities and those who have been ostracized who identify most with Jar Jar. “He’s misunderstood, but Jar Jar’s heart is so pure,” he said.

At the time of the backlash, Lucas assured Best that Jar Jar’s target audience — who were kids and for whom the character would become a fond childhood memory — would eventually come to his defense. “He was right,” Best said. “It’s a different story now.”

Witness the reception for Best in 2019 at “Star Wars” Celebration, an event dedicated to the franchise, when fans welcomed him with thunderous applause. “It really warmed my heart to see him get that,” Chiang recalled.

Heart comes up a lot when Best’s name is mentioned.

Dave Filoni, the chief creative officer of Lucasfilm and a writer on “The Mandalorian,” described him as “a unique talent, and no one can replicate what he brings through his performance as Jar Jar. There is comedy, but also a lot of heart.”

And Best takes solace in the role he’s played behind the scenes as well. He noted that the software developed through his work as Jar Jar became central to the creation of future C.G.I. characters.

“I’m in there,” Best said. “You can’t have Gollum without Jar Jar. You can’t have the Na’vi in ‘Avatar’ without Jar Jar. You can’t have Thanos or the Hulk without Jar Jar. I was the signal for the rest of this art form, and I’m proud of Jar Jar for that, and I’m proud to be a part of that. I’m in there!”

#glad he's living his best life #ahmed best #jar jar binks #kelleran beq #star wars: the phantom menace #star wars #the new york times

12 notes · View notes