Bloopers That Make Us Love Star Wars Even More
It's probably fair to say that the Star Wars movies are the most popular film series of all time. Not only have the seven official chapters (and the growing number of offshoots) brought in billions of dollars and made stars out of actors like Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Daisy Ridley, but they've captivated hundreds of millions the world over with spaceship battles, alien creatures, lightsaber duels, and classic stories of good triumphing over evil.
But making a great movie—or making a bunch of great movies (hey, the prequels aren't that bad)—is extremely hard. It takes a lot of money, time, and effort to put a Star Wars movie together, which means once in a while someone's going to blow a take. Here are a few times when actors hilariously goofed up while making a Star Wars film.
A super blooper
Star Wars: A New Hope is a science fiction movie, which means the dialogue includes a lot of technical words, alien planets and races, unusual character names, and assorted other jargon. Actors have to memorize all that stuff, or at least be able to read it all off cue cards properly—and after all that, it's a fairly simple word that ended up throwing off Mark Hamill while filming this scene.
Man vs. Sword, Round 1
As he famously made abundantly clear in Taken, Liam Neeson has "a very particular set of skills," all of them impressive, dangerous, and probably fatal. It would seem that the proper handling of a lightsaber is not among those skills. In the course of portraying Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, Neeson tried to smoothly unsheathe his definitive Star Wars weapon, but as this take proves, he wasn't quite a real-life Jedi master.
General nonsense from the Death Star commander
Bloopers can add a fascinating dimension to extremely familiar movie scenes. Take, for example, this well-known moment from Star Wars: A New Hope, in which Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) begs and pleads with the stone-hearted Governor Tarkin, Commander of the Death Star, not to blow up her adopted home planet of Alderaan. Actor Peter Cushing reels around to chastise her, but gets tongue-tied and descends into mock indignation. Fisher can't help but laugh at her scene partner.
Man vs. Sword, Round 2
At some point in the last 40 years, virtually every kid in America has staged an epic, imaginary lightsaber battle in their bedroom, jumping around and swinging a makeshift weapon. While filming a scene as Anakin Skywalker, the man who would be Darth Vader in Attack of the Clones, Hayden Christensen looks just like a Star Wars-loving little boy—up to the moment he loses his balance and feels the Force...of gravity, and topples over.
How to defeat a stormtrooper
Blindly serving the evil Darth Vader, stormtroopers are intimidating, cutthroat, and unemotional agents of death and destruction. And there are always so many of them! What could possibly stop them in their march of doom? A hole too small to fit through. As seen in this blooper from Star Wars: A New Hope, that's all it really takes. Okay, well, a weapon will take down the first one; the rest will be stymied by the stormtrooper directly in front of them, and so on.
Droid down!
From the first Star Wars film until his death in 2016, actor Kenny Baker operated R2-D2 from the inside. He was so good at his job, as were the host of special effects wizards and engineers that helped create the robot, that it's easy to forget that R2-D2 isn't really a super-advanced droid—it's really somewhere between a costume and a prop, and it's hollow inside. This means that R2-D2, and poor Kenny Baker inside, would fall down at the slightest provocation. Or the controls could suddenly go out, as they did in this blooper from The Phantom Menace, in which R2 can't help but run straight into actor Ahmed Best, who's wearing a motion capture suit while portraying Jar Jar Binks.
Hayden Christensen has no problem letting go
Acting isn't just about saying words—it's also about moving your body and interacting with other actors. Saying words, moving your body around, and interacting with other actors all at the same time—and in the correct order—can be a lot to remember, and if an actor screws up just one of those little things, it ruins the take. In this scene from Attack of the Clones, Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman clearly both knew their lines, and Christensen knew he was supposed to let go of Portman's arm—he just did it way too early.
Face-off!
By its very nature as a prequel, Revenge of the Sith sets up what will happen in the "original" Star Wars trilogy of A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. By the time those movies roll around, droids like R2-D2 and C-3PO are well-oiled, highly-functioning machines. In the prequels, however, a blooper inadvertently shows audiences that in the Star Wars universe, it might take some time to work all the kinks out of a droid. Padmé (Natlie Portman) attaches a face plate to a very familiar-looking droid...but it just won't stay on.
Alec Guinness is not having fun
Writer Piers Paul Read collected some of Alec Guinness's letters in Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography, and it reveals an actor who didn't think too highly of Star Wars. Before taking the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Guinness called the movie "fairy-tale rubbish." In a letter he wrote while the film was in production, Guinness said he "can't say I'm enjoying the film" in part due to "rubbish dialogue." That seething resentment from the legendary English actor is on display in this blooper from the set of A New Hope. After he's upstaged by one of Chewbacca's hairy arms, he nervously smiles and sneers his way through the awkward moment.
Yoda remember lines cannot
Even the most vocal The Phantom Menace detractor—of which there are many—has to admit that a highlight from the first, long-awaited Star Wars prequel was the return of Yoda. Frank Oz returned to provide the Jedi Master's grammatically wonky voice, and even though Oz wasn't physically on camera at all, he still seemed to get nervous on set. Turns out it's quite charming when wise, serious Yoda breaks down in the middle of a monologue.