kingofattolia:
Honestly I cannot overstate how much seeing Hayden as TCW Anakin changed EVERYTHING. Matt Lanter’s Anakin is a frat dude. He wears a backwards baseball hat and says vaguely offensive things without realizing, while being a fundamentally chill and outgoing guy at heart. Hayden’s Anakin is… not that. His voice. His expressions. His physical presence. It’s off somehow. It’s just left of normal. It’s completely unremarkable and yet deeply uncanny for reasons you can’t quite describe. TCW Anakin was always a flatter, blander portrayal, but I don’t think I realized until now what exactly was missing: the serial killer energy. The inarticulable conviction that SOMETHING unhinged is going on behind those eyes.
It’s why he was cast in the first place:
“He’s charming and he’s young, but at the same time, he’s got a real nice edge to him. He’s one of these slightly brooding young Turks in the Marlon Brando/James Dean mold.”
- George Lucas, LA Times, 2001
Yes, he’s got the boyish, youthful aspect… but there’s also that underlying darkness that you always catch a glint of.
“The thing that got Hayden the role was that—beyond being an extremely talented actor— he had this boyish quality that was necessary for this impatient young kid, who’s very similar to Luke. Anakin’s roughly the same age in Clones that Luke was in A New Hope. Hayden also has a great capacity to have a brooding dark side. He’s very good with anger and those kinds of qualities — which aren’t only important to this film, but even more important in the next one. So I was casting for two films and for the arc of this character, not just how he behaves in Clones.”
- Starlog Magazine #300, 2002
His fellow actors acknowledges this nuance too:
“You can start to put the pieces together of how Anakin gets to be Darth Vader. You can see it in Hayden’s performance; you can imagine Anakin going to the dark side because of his frustrations, his ego, and his pain.”
- Ewan McGregor, as re-released in Star Wars Insider: The Skywalker Saga Collector’s Edition, 2021
“What has to happen, and I’m confident that it will mainly because of Hayden’s wonderful performance, is for the audience to think. “Yes, I suppose that could happen to me.” The temptation has to be convincing, real, and desirable — even though at the end of the day you would hope that you wouldn’t succumb because the ends are obvious.”
- Ian McDiarmid, Star Wars Insider #82, 2005
