Jar Jar Binks. Call the name to every hardcore war of stars Fan and then stand back to see the explosion. Nobody is neutral.
Actor Ahmed Best, who brought the goofy Gungan character to life, faced a number of ups and downs with his role. Opinions about the character followed his Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace Debuted 25 years ago.
Best spoke to People about the role. Not all of his memories were pleasant.
“Everyone came for me,” he remembers. “I’m the first person to do this kind of (motion capture) work, but I was also the first black person, the first black man.”
Best said he was “banned” from doing similar motion capture work in Hollywood because his character received a lot of criticism at the time.
He was on tour with the dance group Stomp in 1997 when a casting director offered an audition at Lucasfilm’s Skywalker Ranch. he won both the physical role and the voice.
The Voice debuted at a table reading with its cast – Liam Neeson, Jake Lloyd, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and others.
“This was the first time I performed the Jar Jar voice in front of people. And honestly, I didn’t know if I was going to do it or not at this reading. I thought, “Maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t.” And as I’m reading the first few pages, I’m asking myself in my head, “Do I have to do this voice?” Am I not doing this voice? What am I doing?
“Liam has this wonderfully resonant Irish, mid-Atlantic voice that will just melt you. You know what I mean? So I was just like, “Everyone sounds so good.” Am I going to do that voice or not? And then I see the character’s name come up and I was like, “Fuck it.” And I just do it. And everyone in the room is crazy about it. So I was like, “Okay, all right.” I pulled that out. I should be here now.’”
Best spent two years commuting between New York and Industrial Light & Magic’s studios in San Francisco to complete the role’s CGI. He got along well with everyone along the way.
“Everyone was respected and no one was bigger than the work,” recalls Best of filming in England. “And I think that was the ethos we followed when creating the prequels. Star Wars will always be the right thing. We are working towards that. So to the extent that we can make this world, these characters, these situations believable, we will be. We won’t be stars about Star Wars. There’s nothing bigger than Star Wars. And I think that’s what made our cast really special.”
The cast was “in our little bubble” during filming, he said.
“So when you get out of that bubble, you think, ‘Oh man, everyone’s going to enjoy what we just did, because if you feel the way we felt when we created something, it’s going to be great. ‘ But there were already certain preconceived notions about it, and this online hate is already bubbling up. It was already being talked about before the film came out.”
The online hate only grew after the film’s release in May 1999. It affected not only Jar Jar as a character, but also Best, who received death threats because of his performance.
“It really wasn’t easy,” he recalls of the backlash. “I was very young. I was 26. And it’s hard to have the idea that you’re finally getting what you’ve worked for your whole life and you’re finally in the big leagues and at the highest level of the game and hold your own. All these years you always think: “I belong at the top of the game.” I belong at the highest level. And then suddenly people pull the rug out from under you. And I just thought: “What is happening now?” My career began and ended. I didn’t know what to do and unfortunately there was really no one who could help me because it was such a unique situation. “This has never happened before in history” said Best.
“Especially with the internet component. There is now a whole field of psychology based on it. But what do I say to a psychologist at this point? I just tried to do the best job I could do. But George [Lucas] is untouchable and everyone was untouchable. Who wasn’t untouchable? Me. Everyone came towards me.”
Best previously admitted that he thought about taking his own life one early morning on the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I didn’t want to hurt my family like that,” Best now shares. “So it was something bigger than me that made me walk away. I was still lost. I still couldn’t find my footing and just felt the injustice of it all. How could I achieve something so wonderful and then nothing? Nothing. I longed to move on. I wanted to continue this work. I wanted to keep going in that direction and see what the CGI thing could evolve into.”
Casting directors often thought the Jar Jar character was computer-generated, and Best had to fight that. “I was carrying this weight that was hard to shake.”
Best says Jar Jar’s war of stars In the two subsequent prequels – particularly in 2005 – the role diminished and disappeared Revenge of the Sith. But like many fans, he hopes to learn something about Jar Jar’s fate at some point.
“I would love for there to be a really good ending just to learn what happened to Jar Jar. And then I don’t think it has to be tragic,” says Best.
In the end everything turned out well. He worked as an adjunct instructor at USC and appeared in the Disney+ series Star Wars The Mandalorian, and is the father of a 15-year-old son who “gets all my attention.
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace is now hitting theaters ahead of its 25th anniversary on May 19th.