Out of about 1500 potential actors considered for the role of Anakin Skywalker, George Lucas handpicked Hayden.
Do you think he made the right choice?
Who would you have chosen out of the pool of around 20 year old actors in 2000/2001?
Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker
Yes. It was iconic in part because it was bad. It fit the Greek theatre feel of the sets, costumes, and dialogue that unironically played in well with the mythological feel of the prequels that somehow made it genuinely feel like both a long long time ago in and also a galaxy far far away.
fpbp even doe an AI wrote this
You can't do Rey or Luke impressions.
That's a major sign of something iconic.
this is a whole new level of cope lmao
He did a good job acting as Anakin in the the prequels it's just the dialogue was bad because George was being a fat control freak.
Watch the movie Jumper. It sucks, but it does show he could've done better if he had been given something to work with.
yes he was great and i'm tired of people shitting on him
This. I know angsty youngens way more melodramatic than Anikan IRL.
He played the dead inside role of an ex-slave and child abuse victim to a T. He was youthful, but not like a cringy spoiled teenager, he avoided the "Wesley Crusher" effect, driven, but not like a poser, the script was terrible, but he carried it.
>played
He was just pissed at Lucas.
He modeled his performance on both David Prowse and James Earl Jones. Since he’s Young Vader, he has to move and sound like him.
I view it this way
His story starts at attack of the clones, there are chunks of him between reverge of the sith in obi wan then revenge of the sith then ahsoka
He's kind of a brat keeps getting screwed over eventually has his down fall the pops back up post return of the jedi to help ahsoka
My boy was perfection.
Pretty good decision considering how he STILL can play Anakin to this day. He's gonna show up again in season 2 btw.
Yes he had the perfect look and just the right amount of edge while still being likable and sympathetic
He is actually perfectly cast
He is a good actor (watch Shattered Glass)
He is heroic and very good looking, leading man
He is angsty and c**ty and looks subtly evil
He got fricked by TERRIBLE writing and TERRIBLE direction (I like the prequels, but, yes), and it sucks he gets a hard time, because he really was perfectly cast and did the best with the material he got
I'm not sure it's possible to disentangle how much is poor direction and how much is poor execution, but the maddening thing is that a lot of scenes could have been vastly improved if his delivery hadn't been so exaggerated/overstated/incongruous with the delivery of his co-actors
it is clear that Lucas cast him primarily for his look and his ability to act with his face; Lucas has said many times that he puts much more weight on the visual appearance of his films than anything else. In this regard, he was indeed perfect
Even though I cringe at nu-SW disney fans, and Disney in general, I still can't help but at least make a smirk when I see Hayden finally being recognized as a beloved part of the series at this point.
And you can see that this reaction by the fans meant a lot to him. An uncaring or bitter man wouldn't have reacted this way.
Well imagine this is also after a decade of every self-proclaimed critic calling you a joke and a terrible actor
Fricking boomers with their "le original trilogy" back then and their fricking standards. Remember what they did to that poor kid Jake Lloyd?
Why the frick were the critics and fanbase such c**ts back then, come to think of it? I mean sure the Prequels had some serious issues writing and dialogue-wise here and there, but still. They were just movies.
It's because geek culture was more effective at gatekeeping homosexuals like yourself.
The prequels were massive at the time and Star Wars was riding high. The haters were a very loud minority of autists that no normies ever listened to.
You say the same shit about Enterprise yet it killed Star Trek faster than STD
It got three seasons. I think everyone just had Trek Fatigue at that point. It was normies that kept Trek going, not the autistic fans.
fatigue from what? the last star trek before STD was enterprise which ended 12 years prior
I was referring to fatigue prior to Enterprise. As for STD that’s just the shit writing. And being a streaming service that nobody wants.
i was so happy for him when he got this reception
The problem wasn't the actors, it was the dialogue of the script.
Neither were a problem
Watch theatre
The script was the problem, not the casting. Whenever anyone praises Hayden Christensen as Anakin, they always, always focus on Episode III, where 90% of the plot was set in stone by the original trilogy and it was virtually impossible for Lucas to frick it up (although he did try, god bless him).
>virtually impossible for Lucas to frick it up
What about Leiah remembering her mother lol
They should have just made Anakin a few years older, which would have been more fitting with his apparent age in Ep.6, and cast Stuart Townsend as Clone Wars era Anakin.
Millennial women already schlick to Anakin too much as it is. That would just be unreasonable.
Nobody was gonna salvage that garbage. He did the best he could under those circumstances.