In one of the most memorable scenes of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker murders a bunch of Younglings as he plows down the path toward going fully evil and becoming Darth Vader. Actor Hayden Christensen has reflected on this scene, telling Empire that director George Lucas made a “bold” call to put this into the movie, given the subject matter of killing kids.
Christensen said the scene was “shocking,” and revealed that filming the sequence took time because the child actor in the scene, Ross Beadman, wasn’t initially giving the kind of reaction that Lucas wanted. So Christensen amped things up.
“So I shouted, or growled at him, because we needed a genuine moment of him being startled. It got the response that we needed, and it makes that scene work really well,” he said.
Christensen and Beadman reconnected years later, and Christensen told him, “Sorry about how that went.”
The prequels were not very well-received at the time of their release in the early 2000s. Christensen said said the blowback was understandable because he thinks people “feel a sense of ownership” over characters they like so much. However, the criticisms of Christensen’s performance and the story arc of Anakin “sucked,” he said. Christensen went on to say that negative reviews can stem from a “certain failure” of a person’s own suspension of disbelief.
“If you’re gonna go sit in a theatre, and the opening scroll starts with, ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,’ that’s setting the stage that anything is possible,” he said. “These people don’t need to sound and behave the way that we might expect. And if you’re going to sit down and think that you’re getting something that is of our current zeitgeist, then you’re setting yourself up for something else.”
Now that many years have passed, though, and Christensen has returned to play Darth Vader again in the Obi-Wan and Ahsoka shows, he said he’s happy to see the public sentiment turn around to a degree.
“I think that those movies have held up well over time. It feels like vindication for the work that we did. Everyone that worked on those movies thought that we were part of something special,” he said. “We all wanted to do our very best work, and we cared a lot about it. And so to see the response from the fans now, it’s very cool.”
The Star Wars movie series continues in 2026 with the release of The Mandalorian & Grogu. On the TV side, the next new show, The Acolyte, is reportedly coming this June. As for Star Wars video games, a new Mandalorian title from Respawn has supposedly been canceled.
