Ahmed Best's Hope For His Star Wars Future? Jedi John Wick
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Ahmed Best—the man who brought Jar Jar Binks to life and then faced decades of horrifying harassment for it—shouldn’t have needed a Star Wars redemption arc, but he arguably has had one of a sort in the last few years, beyond a renaissance of prequels re-examination, in the form of Kelleran Beq: the Jedi gameshow host turned savior of Grogu on The Mandalorian. But Best is ready for more... a lot more.
“I want to do a Jedi John Wick as Kelleran Beq,” Best recently said of his aspirations for where his Star Wars journey takes him next, as part of an interview with Comicbook.com. “And I don’t even need to say any words. I just want to do two hours of lightsabers and people in the way. I really want to do something like that because the fight that I did for Mandalorian is 1/10th of 1% of what I could do. And there’s so much more.”
Best has put a lot of thought into his approach to Beq’s physicality—“Most of the Jedi are Japanese Samurai influenced, but the Filipinos beat the Samurai and they beat the Spanish. The way they move, the style that they move, and the weapons that they use are revolutionary,” the actor continued, adding that “it’s so much so that a lot of what Bruce Lee does in Jeet Kune Do is influenced by Filipino martial arts. So I really want that to be highlighted through some kind of Jedi story.” And if there’s one thing Star Wars is quite good at, it’s occasionally divorcing the Jedi from their non-violent beliefs to do all sorts of wild and cool action stuff.
But there is something quite interesting, beyond that physicality of the kind of tale Best wants for Beq—a character created for a children’s game show, a custodian of younglings as they prepared to partake in the spiritual and physical trials that would shape them into Jedi learners, on the precipice of a galactic war unseen in scale for generations—then having to grapple between the outbreak of the Clone Wars and the rise of the Galactic Empire as the sort of person who would be forced to become a so-called “Jedi John Wick.” More and more as of late, Star Wars has been interested in playing with the legacy of how the Clone Wars changed the Jedi that survived it, and how the Order’s hypocrisy was all too eager to fashion weapons out of its students. We’ve seen it in Ahsoka and Anakin’s spiritual journey, we’ve seen it most recently in Barriss Offee.
The idea of examining that again in a character like Kelleran Beq—and giving Best as an actor something to chew on beyond being the canonical catalyst from how Grogu got from a metaphorical point A to point B—is a potent one. And perhaps a bit more than what Best wants from his chance to spend a couple of hours beating the snot out of some villains. Why not have it all, though?
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