‘Star Wars’ Is Still Having Trouble Minting Movie Stars After All These Years

Jul 07, 2023

Two of the three leading roles in the new horror film The Boogeyman are played by actors from Star Wars, but a casual fan would be forgiven for not necessarily putting this together. The Star Wars series has expanded so far beyond the original three movies and occasional kiddie spinoff that it now encompasses 11 feature films and four live-action TV shows, plus plenty more in animation, with more to come all around. Long past are the days where "an actor from Star Wars" could reliably assumed to mean Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, or Harrison Ford—but the series’ ability to help mint new stars is as uncertain as ever, maybe more so.

Of course, the original trilogy wasn't especially known for its star-making properties, either. Of the three virtual unknowns in its leading roles, only Harrison Ford really became a top-level multiplex fixture; his assist from the Indiana Jones character (Raiders of the Lost Ark came out between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) made him seem like the exception that proved the rule. Still, with the fullness of time, the lead trio's careers look better than they might have seemed back in the 1980s: Carrie Fisher appeared in several classics, including Hannah and Her Sisters and When Harry Met Sally…, before largely stepping back from acting and focusing more on her writing, something that was purportedly inspired by her early Hollywood experiences. (She also admittedly had a leg up as the nepo baby daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher.) Mark Hamill failed to parlay the trilogy's success into other big roles, but came out the other side as a respected voiceover artist, character actor, and elder statesman of sorts; he's appearing in theaters nationwide right now in The Machine. (Bad movie, but good for him; it's a big part.)

A Hamill-like fate may await Hayden Christensen, who was the major new (grown-up, non-CGI) face in George Lucas's prequel trilogy. Those movies primarily relied on figures like Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Liam Neeson, and Samuel L. Jackson, who had all played leading roles before The Phantom Menace. Christensen, who played young-adult Anakin Skywalker in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, was roundly derided for his peculiar affect, somewhere between a Canadian teen-idol sulk and an odd-emphasis Christopher Walken seethe. (His rat tail in Clones didn't help, either.) Yet he received a hero's welcome from some audiences when revisiting the role in selected scenes from the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series, suggesting that sheer familiarity with his odd, sometimes off-putting performance style may have endeared him to a plurality, maybe even a slim majority, of contemporary Star Wars fans.

The strange thing is, a long history of Star Wars failing to launch acting careers into the stratosphere (and occasionally exposing performers to the most noxious and abusive sides of fandom) hasn't dissuaded talented actors from putting in their time and hoping for the best. If anything, the post-Disney Star Wars projects have featured savvier casting than ever, especially the J.J. Abrams-directed The Force Awakens. (Abrams isn't good at endings, but he knows how to cast the hell out of a beginning.) That New Hope retread succeeds in large part because Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, and John Boyega make it feel fresher and more charming than it might have read on paper.

Yet this hasn't quite translated into next-gen stardom for anyone involved, save perhaps Adam Driver, for whom Kylo Ren was a periodic stop on his route through an astonishing itinerary of master filmmakers: Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann, Noah Baumbach, Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, and Francis Ford Coppola. Isaac (probably the best-known of the heroic trio going into the movie) has done his best work steering away from big franchises; Boyega has taken a few leads in small films and some unmemorable supporting parts in bigger ones. As for Daisy Ridley, two notable films loom on her horizon, among others: Sometimes I Think About Dying, a small-scale drama from this year's Sundance, in which she is very good; and, hey, an untitled Star Wars movie, in which she’ll reprise her role of Rey, reviving the Jedi order years after the events of Episode IX. While Hamill sought for years to establish himself outside of Luke Skywalker, actors today are more likely to stick with their most famous roles.

This willingness to revisit signature roles, combined with the inability to find major movie-star success elsewhere, has a lot to do with a franchise-obsessed industry that has collapsed its own star market by yoking so many performers to famous roles and—shudder—brands, leaving every potential leading actor in search of an ongoing series to serve as sort of a financial backstop. But Star Wars itself can be blamed, too. Its biggest recent projects have been in television, on shows that seem happy to steer clear of new human faces whenever possible. The central relationship on The Mandalorian happens between a man who never takes off his helmet (in a performance credited to Pedro Pascal that's mostly voice acting, body-doubling, and cool-armoring) and an adorable creature brought to life with puppetry and animation. The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan have their share of mask-centric legacy characters, too, alongside known quantities like Ewan McGregor. Only Andor has introduced a substantial number of humans with a lot of complicated acting to do—and by design, those skew more character-actor than charisma-bomb star.

Yet Star Wars hasn't lost its knack for casting potential stars; only for giving those actors substantial material. Which brings us back to The Boogeyman: It stars Sophie Thatcher (pictured above), who played Drash, a leader of the "mods," a youthful cybernetically-enhanced biker gang from The Book of Boba Fett, and Vivien Lyra Blair, who played a young Princess Leia on Obi-Wan Kenobi, as sisters bedeviled by a fantastical, predatory creature while grieving the death of their mother. The movie itself, based on a Stephen King short story, is full of overfamiliar and sometimes arbitrary horror ideas (ominously spreading water stains; beady eyes staring from the darkness; the real monster is grief; etc.). But it has some well-orchestrated scares, and the two young actresses lend the vaguely phony proceedings some much-needed credibility. Thatcher has a haunted, raw-nerve quality audiences may recall from Yellowjackets (she plays the young Natalie); her brooding never looks like an affectation. Blair is the rare child star who acts believably precocious in the way so many real-life children do: that is to say, selectively, with plenty of childlike mouthiness alongside her curiosity.

They both seem well-liked by Disney, the parent company of both Lucasfilm and 20th Century Studios, which is releasing The Boogeyman. Yet they’re not necessarily well-served by the machine that has approved them. The mods were a slept-on delight in the Boba Fett show, pushing forward an age group that doesn't often register in Star Wars unless they’re saving the galaxy or reviving the Jedi order. Thatcher has the right vibe to revive the youth-picture spirit Lucas originally brought to the series, ably crossing goth-teen toughness with ’50s-greaser iconography. But the show seemed to cautiously defer her characters’ contributions to some unseen (and possibly unproduced) future season, or possibly relegate it to some comic books, depending on fan reactions. Those reactions were predictably dumb, preferring the ghoulish CG revival of Luke Skywalker to the flesh-and-blood performances with genuine life in their eyes.

That's where a lot of Star Wars seems to be centered right now: Figuring out how to extend the lives of old characters, old-made-young faces, or even just iconic helmets, rather than inviting new actors into the fold. Just ask poor Alden Ehrenreich, a perfectly charming recast Han Solo blamed for his spinoff movie's middling box office. Blair had more luck as Leia—more opportunity to show off both her sass and sensitivity. Scenes between her and McGregor's Obi-Wan were a highlight of that series. But I felt a strange sense that her take on Leia was received mainly as a pale imitation of Grogu (who, I hasten to point out again, is not real—meaning likeness rights, residuals, and future contracts are all gloriously moot). The series has developed a particularly bad habit of casting spirited, charismatic women like Thatcher, Blair, and Rogue One's Felicity Jones, then failing to give them a proper showcase. (I’d accuse them of treating these ladies as action figures, but Drash and Little Leia didn't even get that toy-shelf treatment.) The Boogeyman is negligible as a film, and by all rights shouldn't give Sophie Thatcher more interesting stuff to do than multiple episodes of a Star Wars TV show. But the long-running series seems determined, at least for now, to keep its head out of the stars.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He's a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned