Hollywood rapscallion Taika Waititi “forgot” Natalie Portman was in the Star Wars prequels
What’s next? Did he forget Watto was in those movies?
Aux News Natalie Portman
No one seems more satisfied with himself than Taika Waititi. And why shouldn’t he be? The Kiwi filmmaker is on top of the world. He’s got a Tumblr-approved pirate show, an Oscar for writing a whimsical Hitler movie, and a second Thor movie primed for boffo B.O. Plus he’s somehow memory-holed Natalie Portman’s legendary portrayal as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequels. Now that we as a culture like those movies for being a singular man’s boring but startlingly accurate vision of how democracies fall to fascism, we must feign the surprise that anyone could forget a line reading like “I will not a condone a course of action that will lead us to war.” [If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of this writer’s monocle falling directly into his martini glass at the mere hint of someone forgetting about Queen Amidala.]
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Waititi reflected on his first conversation with Portman when he made that classic Portman faux pas and asked her if she would ever be interested in being in Star Wars.
Natalie said to me, what do you do next? And I said “I’m trying to work on a Star Wars thing. Have you ever wanted to be in a Star Wars movie?” She said, “I’ve been in Star Wars movies.” I forgot about those ones. [Laughs]
With all due respect, Mr. Waititi, Padmé survived the effin’ Clone Wars and the invasion of Naboo, but sadly, not a broken heart, which famously killed her character. So rude. Does he not remember that Kiera Knightly was also in some of those movies? What about Joel Edgerton? Sure, everyone forgets about Edgerton until he turns up in an Obi-Wan Kenobi and reminds people that, yes, the star of Gringo is back, baby.
Of course, being a man of impish frivolity, Waititi was probably goofin’ around. After all, this is the guy who also told Rolling Stone that he retracts saying that his Star Wars movie would be disconnected from the so-called “Skywalker Saga” because he was charmed by the idea of a movie about “Chewbacca’s grandmother.” He continued:
There’s thousands of books that have been written, these volumes of books about Star Wars
with all those characters. I just don’t have time to get through them.
So I can’t say like, you know, confidently, I’d be able to do something
that’s like very close to what everyone knows. I’m not promising that
I’m not going to do anything like that. I’m just saying: It’d
be easier for me to not do that. Would you like to see a Jar Jar Binks
movie?
[…]
If you take away all of the Star Wars stuff, it’s not Star Wars. So I retract my thing that I said a couple of weeks ago!
He also admitted that this Star Wars thing might not even happen because, as we’ve learned over the past few years, Lucasfilm loves to announce Star Wars movies almost as much as they love to cancel them. But if it does happen, maybe Taika Waititi can make Natalie Portman’s dream of being in a Star Wars come true.
75 Comments
primed for boffo body odor?
Sure (deodorant)!
Matt smells like Teen Spirit
Raise your hand if you’re certain.
Suave!
“boxed orifice” — it’s actually how you avoid smelling body odor if you encapsulate your nose.
I imagine Chris Hemsworth smells amazing
Strong enough for a man but made for Matt Schimkowitz
Anakin The Professional
A Star Wars Story
The man straight up memory-holed the Star Wars prequels; wish I could do that.
He forgot about the prequels?*remembers Rise of Skywalker*Is it possible to learn this power?
The dark side of Star Wars fandom is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be … unnatural.
Not from a J.J. …
Oscar Isaac has been three Marvel characters so far, Natalie Portman can be two.
Three? Are you counting Star Wars as Marvel?
Nope, Apocalypse, Moon Knight and Spider-Man 2099.
I didn’t even realize that was him at the end of Spider-verse.
He’s gonna be in the sequel so it counts.
One decent project out of three ain’t bad!
For a second I thought you were counting Steven (with a V) and Marc Spector as two seperate characters. I was about to accuse you of cheating,
To be fair, Natalie Portman forget she was in those movies, too.
Watto, tho.
What?!
Oh…
Watto matter with you?
I wish I could forget The Phantom Menace and the Clone wars and even her shitty acting in Revenge of the Sith (even If I really liked that movie). Prequels are mostly shit while the sequels end in shit.
“The Last Jedi” was clearly the worst film in the franchise and you have to be dumb as a box of rocks not to know that.
Nah. The prequels are good ideas shittily executed, the sequels are shit ideas competently executed. Neither is really “better” than the other.
This is the correct take. Great ideas in those prequals.
I might have at one point said a paraphrasing of what you posted.
I’ve seen it other places too. It’s not exactly a hot take, but (as you say below) it is the correct one.
Nah, I’m old enough that I saw all 9 movies in the theater (even though Star wars I was too young to remember) and the 1st 2 prequels were so bad it was funny. The Sequels had 1 great movie and 1 shot for shot remake and one movie meant to make fat white guys happy to end the series.
Nah. The prequels are good ideas shittily executed, the sequels are shit ideas competently executed. Neither is really “better” than the other.TBH this describes everything Disney’s done with Star Wars other than Mando.
I mean, one or the other is about 90-95% of all movies (or art, for that matter) anyways. The OT is lightning in a bottle 2 1/2 times. Its pretty crazy to think it would have been recaptured, especially with 20 year gaps between films.
LOL – I’ll never forget I was in grade 11 and I had just seen V for Vendetta. And I told my buddy at school to go see it and he goes “Is it better than Revenge of the Sith?” and I’m like “oh yah buddy!” and he was like “yoooo!”.
We were so naive back then.
“ideas are bulletproof!”
I laugh at people who act like revenge of the sith when it came out wasn’t considered good. It was, I was already and adult when it came out and it was so much better than 1 and 2 but yeah the acting and dialog is so bad!I’m old enough to remember the casual fan and kids didn’t like Empire as much as Star Wars (I’m never calling it a new hope) and Jedi. It’s why it made the least amount of money because young kids were heart broken over it and not realzing it maybe the best movie ever !:)
Home with Covid recently, I rewatched the prequels for the first time in probably 15 years. They… weren’t as bad as I remembered? Don’t get me wrong, Obi-Wan looking for info at the space diner with the fat greasy droid is still an abonimation of all that’s holy, but the plotting isn’t bad, the lightsaber fights are good to great, and, i don’t know… the Trade Federation war doesn’t bother me as the genesis of the Empire. I STILL don’t fully understand the origin of the clone army, but in general everything makes a little more sense and you can see a reason for everything, unlike the way the sequels just fell apart/ran out of gas creatively.
Darth Sidious commissioned the clone army as part of his plan to consolidate power. It’s not at all clear whether he intended Obi Wan to find the clone army, or if it was just a coincidence that Obi Wan tracked Jango Fett to that water planet at the most convenient time. My son just watched the whole series with me, and it’s softened me on the prequels quite a bit. He also enjoyed Rise of Skywalker just fine, and it was the only one we got to see for the first time together, so I didn’t mind it. I appreciate that Abrams modeled the reanimated Emperor after Chinnard from Hellraiser 2.
I thought some Jedi originally commissioned the clone army? I thought that was meant to be Count Duku before he turned to the dark side? I still have no idea.
I was an adult when both the prequels and sequels came out. The prequels are for now 25-35 year old dorks and they are so bad, part 3 at least had a lot of cool stuff. The Sequels ended so bad because MAGA fat white men were so mad at the last jedi and fuck those fat slobs.
After Waititi’s last interview, I was wondering how long it’s been since the announcement of a new Star Wars film in the franchise. According to Wiki, “In February 2013, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed the development of two Star Wars standalone
films, one written by Lawrence Kasdan. Shortly thereafter, it was
reported that Disney was working on a film featuring Solo.” This, of
course, came after the summer 2012 announcement of a sequel trilogy.
So, in the nine years and counting since early 2013, Lucasfilm hasn’t
announced (as in, named a director and a release date, and stuck with
both) a single new Star Wars movie. In that time frame, they’ve only announced one new movie at all, Indy 5,
which itself was known to be in active development since before 2013.
Even given Disney’s pivot to streaming content and the pandemic,
that’s… kind of bonkers, IMO.
At the time, the other movies in the pipeline (mostly just rumor or very early development) were a Boba Fett movie and Kenobi movie. The Boba Fett movie kind of in a very sideways way morphed into The Mandalorian (if only that when the Fett movie went kaput they decided to try something else starring a Mandalorian character) and the Kenobi movie morphed into the show. And then we got a Fett show anyway. So what I’m getting at is that you are right, it’s bonkers, but doubly so when you consider it’s only now that we are about to get to content(streaming or film) that wasn’t announced or planned in some shape of form during those initial years when Disney first got Lucasfilm.
Who know what Disney expected when they bought Lucasfilm, but the Disney Star Wars movies weren’t nearly as profitable as the George Lucas ones. On average, the first six movies and the animate Clone Wars movie generate ~18.5x their budget at the box office (that average is skewed by the first movie being incredibly profitable; the median is around 8x budget, and the lowest gross was Episode 2 which made back around 5.7x its budget). That’s not bad for what was, in essence, an independent studio. On the other hand, the sequel trilogy and the “Star Wars Story” movies generate, on average, about 4.5x their budget – the median around 4.2x budget, since the spread is much lower (the least profitable one was Solo at 1.3x budget, and the most was Force Awakens at 8.4x its budget, a little lower than Phantom Menace). I realize how crude this approach is, and the value of something in a corporate structure is more complicated, but the long and short is that Lucasfilm has been investing a lot more capital into Star Wars than it used to, and they aren’t getting proportionate returns.
let’s not forget how much money they spent on the parks and the hotel, neither of which seem to be doing super well (obviously the pandemic hurt)
There’s something ironic about Disney reverse-engineering Star Wars back to where it was before they bought it – ongoing television series, a steady stream of ancillary merchandise like toys and video games, and some event movies every decade or so.There was probably some executive in 2013 talking about all the untapped monetary potential in the property, and now they’re like, “Huh, I guess it was pretty well tapped.”
In your quote of the line you added an extra random “a.” Which made me go watch the clip to see if she actually said it all super dumb like that. But no. You just wrote it super dumb like that.
Yeah, the spelling made me wonder if it was a Jar Jar joke… but it was just more AVC typos.
I mean shit, if he absolutely wants to get Natalie Portman in a Star Wars movie, do it set during the Founding of Naboo in the Ye Olde Republic era. Just leave it as an uncanny coincidence that the Queen happens to look like her many generations removed descendant.
Does every Star Wars have to be about the Amidalas?
Between the kabuki makeup and the (presumed) inbreeding, it’s not a massive stretch.
The Queen of Naboo is an elected title, she probably isn’t related to any of the earlier queens.
I’d be OK with Amidala having faked her death and having adventures around the Empire.
My joke has been that Anakin can’t tell the handmaidens apart and actually knocked up Sabe.
He must not have been an 12 year old boy in 2002
lol
nailed it
or 1999
I sure hope Erin Gray got royalties:
I’m pretty sure this scene was Clone Wars on Geonosis in 2002.
Attack of the Clones, but yes. Both images are from that film.
yep, my bad
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a home-made bippy-top and a good blaster at your side, kid.
Oh she has ALWAYS been stunning. I fell in love with her from Leon The Professional. Now before you think that’s creepy I am the same age as her and watched it when it came out, so i wasn’t some creepy old person with the hots for a 12 year old LOL
Same here, other me!
LOL it’s funny literally ANYTIME I have mentioned crushing Portman from that movie I have to 100% of the time also say were are the same age if you don’t it really sounds like your a pedo LOL
Yup! I always just explain it as I fell in love at age 13 and she has aged wonderfully since.
Uh, Gringo. Such an underrated movie!
Her performances do tend to be pretty forgettable
Well, he also didn’t remember he was in Green Lantern.
Maybe it’s the age that I saw it but I very much remember that Natalia Portman taught me how cold space could be
I would trade all that for friendship with Jemaine Clement.
Hell, I forgot there was a Star Wars. Disney should really start marketing this franchise.
No one knows who Joel Edgerton is and Keira Knightley was not famous then.
Hopefully he didn’t forget about Dre.