If you’re a Star Wars fan, chances are you have just spent the past week trying to wrap your head around some very important news coming from the galaxy far, far away: Barbie and Drive star Ryan Gosling has just signed onto the newest movie in the franchise, the upcoming Shawn Levy project Star Wars: Starfighter. Many fans are naturally excited, and not just because Gosling is an amazing actor who can basically tackle anything from blockbusters to small indie joints. A movie centered around starfighters instead of the Skywalker family and its many, many friends is everything audiences have been asking for ever since the breath of fresh air that was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.
But while reasons abound as to why we should be excited about this new project, at least if we want to continue watching new Star Wars projects, there is one question that should be lingering in the air: is Ryan Gosling really the guy we want to see in a Star Wars movie? This has nothing to do with his acting skills, mind you! As stated in the previous paragraph, Gosling is an extraordinary performer. However, when we look at the position he currently occupies in Hollywood, he is just too big a name to be at the forefront of the franchise founded by George Lucas all the way back in 1977. After all, Star Wars has long been a springboard for young, mostly unknown performers. From Mark Hamill to Jake Lloyd to Daisy Ridley, all the main faces of the movie (and now TV) saga have been pretty much new to audiences. So, isn’t Ryan Gosling a strange addition to this club?
Star Wars’ Love for Unknown Actors Dates Back to the 70s
It all started with the man himself: in the 2004 documentary Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy, Lucas reveals that he always wanted to cast fresh faces as the protagonists of the movie we now know as Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. He got Hamill, who had only dabbled in some voice acting apart from appearing in some smaller roles on television, and Carrie Fisher, who had been in only two movies, on one of them credited as “Girl Scout”. When the time came to cast Han Solo, Lucas was actually reluctant to have Harrison Ford on board, as he had already had a pretty prominent role in his own American Graffiti. However, having been invited to read some lines with those who would later become his co-workers, Ford eventually won over the director.
The tradition continued throughout most of the saga. Lucas went with complete unknowns Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen to play Anakin Skywalker in his prequel trilogy, and even co-stars Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman weren’t that big at the time The Phantom Menace came out. McGregor was an indie darling, known for his work with directors like Danny Boyle and Todd Haynes, while Portman was mostly remembered for her controversial performance in Léon: The Professional.
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Things changed a little bit when Disney took control of the ship. Felicity Jones had already been nominated for an Academy Award for The Theory of Everything when she starred in Rogue One, and there’s little Ahsoka and The Mandalorian‘s Rosario Dawson hasn’t done throughout her acting career. Still, most of the major roles went out, at least, to relative unknowns. Take the sequel trilogy, for instance. John Boyega had been in Attack the Block, Oscar Isaac was the star of the Coen brothers‘ Inside Llewyn Davis, and Adam Driver had a recurring role in HBO’s Girls, but they were far from household names. Daisy Ridley, the de facto protagonist of the trilogy, in turn, had her breakout role in The Force Awakens.
This isn’t to say that Star Wars is a complete stranger to big names such as Gosling. The original trilogy had Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the prequels featured Liam Neeson and Christopher Lee as Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn and Sith lord Count Dooku. And then there’s Jones and Dawson… Still, you get the gist: one of Star Wars’ main functions is to catapult young performers to fame. Sometimes, they develop whole careers out of this first encounter with stardom. Sometimes, they don’t. Nevertheless, there is no denying that the franchise has built itself quite a reputation when it comes to shining a light on unknown faces.
Star Wars Works Best When It Stars Unknown Performers
It’s also hard to deny that Star Wars works best when it has unknown performers at its forefront. Sure, their work isn’t always stellar: show anyone that infamous scene of Hayden Christensen proclaiming his hate for sand, and they’ll probably concede that it’s best to have a certified star as your lead. But that is a low blow, and one that doesn’t really do justice to what this long list of unknowns has turned Star Wars into. By casting mostly fresh faces for his franchise, Lucas ensured that the movies would have a sense of grittiness and realism that few others could achieve. He ensured that the characters would be the ones to shine, and not the people behind them. Most of all, he ensured that we would find a way of connecting and identifying with the people we were seeing on screen.
This is perhaps the most essential part of Lucas’ casting, as well as the work that was done after he relinquished control of the franchise. When we look at the protagonists of the Star Wars saga, with one or two notable exceptions, we see not film stars, but people like ourselves, like our family and friends: regular people going about their daily chores until they are suddenly pulled into an adventure. That’s why it hurts so much when these stories are predominantly male and white, by the way. This identification is essential to the magic of the saga, and it is something that other franchises, such as Harry Potter and Twilight, have picked up on. There is a certain beauty to seeing someone just as ordinary as yourself hopping on an X-Wing and defeating the Galactic Empire. A beauty that doesn’t go away even when the directing is kind of wonky, like in the prequels, but that does disappear when a famous movie star is shooting the laser beams.
It’s easy to understand why Disney has gone with Ryan Gosling for its newest Star Wars project. The franchise’s movie branch has been suffering quite a lot ever since the Rise of Skywalker fiasco, and TV shows like The Acolyte and The Book of Boba Fett haven’t fared any better. Gosling is one of the few names in contemporary Hollywood that can still put butts in seats, and his role in Barbie, a smash hit in and of itself, was a true revelation. And, you know, there’s a good chance that Star Wars: Starfighter will be pretty cool. However, some of the magic will be missing, a kind of magic that can only be cast by wizards with few other roles in their resume.
