This guy was the star of Star Wars for awhile and now is a “nothing” actor. Is there a better example of someone who was the star of big movies that ended up doing nothing significant with their movie career afterwards?
shareLike Mark Hamill, Hayden was also a terrible actor. The reality of these roles is they didn't require any real acting skills and anyone that fit the suit could have done equally as well as either Hamill or Hayden. I saw the movies that Hamill did beyond Star Wars and his acting in them sucked... Frankly Hayden did better acting in the non-Star Wars movies he was in...but even at that he wasn't any Lawrence Olivier. So was it a wasted career or was it just another case of some 2-bit actor hitting the lottery and getting in a big movie that was beyond their talent.
shareI thought he was good in other movies, like the one about Steven Glass.
Lucas is known for being a terrible director of actors, especially in scenes that call for a lot of emotionality.
Lucas was not a director that spoon fed the actor precisely what they should do and how they should do it... but his style didn't make Alec Guinness or Richard Dreyfuss look bad when they performed in movies he directed. The bottom line is a good actor isn't going to look bad as an actor simply because the director is out of their league. Hayden just wasn't that good and certainly didn't have the ability to elevate a poorly written roll into something better than it was. His delivery of lines in the Star Wars roll was so wooden and lifeless it probably left every high school drama student that watched it think they could have done better and a lot of them probably could have. At the time I just assumed Lucas thought Hayden looked like what he thought Jake Lloyd would look like when he got older and because Lucas was so focused on special effect that he didn't bother to see if Hayden could act.
shareMaybe Hamill wasn't all that good of an actor, but his amateurish nature and enthusiasm worked very well for Luke Skywalker. Hamill's career was undoubtedly altered permanently after his 1977 car accident that occurred before Episode IV was even released.
shareWhat's funny is that Disney is now trying to promote Christensen's return to Star Wars as some sort of triumph, as if fans had been clamoring for the good old days of the 1990s. His performances in episodes I-III were reviled as bad acting jokes, as were Natalie Portman's. You know why? Because they were. You can't blame it all on the script. Both of them seemed like child actors reading lines verbatim, with no gravitas or personality behind them. It was the sort of amateurishness you see in sports celebrities like Shaq, for example, who are injected into films for name recognition and stick out like sore thumbs.
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