Hayden Christensen's return to the Star Wars franchise has been embraced by fans, though there was a time when the Obi-Wan Kenobi star took the brunt of the criticisms for George Lucas' prequels. It wasn't deserved, especially when the actor had a lot of bad material to work with. As a result, there's no denying his performance suffered.
During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter (via SFFGazette.com), Christensen was asked if there's a moment from the two prequels he starred in - Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith - that he's particularly proud of.
"I certainly went back and watched all the films again and studied Anakin as much as I could. There is just a lot going on with the character. He’s always sort of processing and trying to figure out what’s going on around him," he began before recalling a weird interaction with George Lucas on the set of Episode II. "I don’t know that I have a scene that I was most proud of, but there’s a scene where Anakin goes back to Tatooine in Episode II [Attack of the Clones] and speaks to Watto."
"The script had the dialogue written in English and then, in parentheses, it said: 'in Wattanese,'" Christensen continued. "It wasn’t until the day before we started filming that I went to George, and I was like, 'What should Wattanese sound like?' And he was like, 'Well, you know, so long as it doesn’t sound like English or any other language that might sound familiar. You can just make it up' [Laughs]."
"So, I was rushing the night before to try to figure out how to make up Wattanese, and every time I see that scene, I get a bit of a kick out of it."
Considering Lucas is the architect of the Star Wars Universe, you'd think he'd have given an alien language a little more thought than this! It does make us wonder how many other times the writer and director took that approach to these otherworldly dialects, though we'd have never guessed from watching the movie itself.
In Obi-Wan Kenobi, Christensen has been given the chance to explore a slightly more serious side of Anakin Skywalker by picking up with the fallen Jedi ten years after the events of Revenge of the Sith. As Darth Vader, he's proven himself a terrifying, seemingly unstoppable threat in the series, and today's episode delivered on that in a massive way.