Hate to speak ill of a child but the South Asian actor who played Anakin's friend has got to be the worst child performer I've ever seen. The scene when he condescendingly tells Padme "of course" regarding some local politics sticks out partly due to bad writing but mostly due to his acting.
shareAll the kids suck in the prequels, but specifically TPM. And I wouldn't really blame them, imagine if George Lucas was your first director. You know, the director that's famous for his horrendous dialogue and his inability to direct actors? When only 1.5 actors in the entire trilogy give half-decent performances, any kid who was unlucky enough to star in them is excused for a lackluster performance
sharePoint taken. Georgie was able to make otherwise Oscar-level actors look like amateurs engaged in Summerstock.
shareYes. The same guy who directed A New Hope, has an "inability to direct actors". And frankly, he was as much a director on Empire and Jedi as Spielberg was on Poltergeist. He had final say on every little thing in those films, including takes.
People love to shit all over Lloyd's performance, quite honestly, compared to the vast majority of any OTHER child actors of similar age, he did fine. I'm really not sure what people expected out of him. I even remember people complaining that he "didn't seem evil enough"...as a LITTLE KID. Like NO SHIT. That was the point. He was supposed to be a naive, innocent little kid. Not really sure what "Oscar Worthy" child performance people were expecting, or holding him up to.
there are a bunch of good child performances. Haley Joel Osment and Macaulay Culkin gave excellent performances in mainstream movies, and any kid in any Haneke movie is good. Half the cast in The White Ribbon is children, and all do great because Haneke auditioned hundreds and selected the absolute best. But he's also a great director, which is really important when a child is doing their first ever movie. The fact that actors like Samuel L. Jackson and Natalie Portman are awful in the prequels should be proof enough that Lloyd deserves none of the criticism he gets.
I use those 2 actors as examples as they are both very director dependent. Natalie Portman can give a great performance but not by herself. And George is famous for being an awful director, so put 2 and 2 together. Don't give him too much credit for New Hope either. He came up with the premise and went through the terrible ordeal that was making it in the first place, but he is not the reason that it and Empire are so great.
RotJ being meh and the prequels being terrible movies should be proof enough that he is a hack.
Lucas really is known as "The Worst Actor's Director Alive", and an actor who needs help from the director is lost in his films. And what child doesn't need help from the director? No, it's the old pros like Ian McDiarmuid who really shine in his movies, they know what to do, if the director is obsessing over digital tech when he should be blocking scenes and discussing motivation with the actors.
And yes, the performances in the first film worked, which I consider to be a triumph of casting rather than the director guiding his actors. In her book about Star Wars, "The Princess Diarist", Carrie Fisher said that for this her second film, Lucas gave her precisely one vague suggestion re her performance during the entire shoot, and other than that he let her do whatever occurred to her, like using a Brit accent in some scenes and not others.
And that, dear friends, is why Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen suck so badly in the prequels. They were young and needed a director.
All the kids were awful, that one just stuck out because he did more.
shareUnfortunately all kids suck in everything
shareThat's an opinion, of course, so it technically can't be wrong BUT it is.😂 Off the top of my head I can think of a handful of child performances that killed it: Jodie Foster (Taxi Driver), Tatum O'Neal (The Bad News Bears), Haley Joel Osment (Sixth Sense), Natalie Portman (Leon), Miko Hughes (Pet Sematary), Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild) and Christian Bale (Empire of the Sun) just to name a few.
shareI was just generalizing. 99.9% is close enough for me.
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