Ahmed Best has always wanted to explore the Darth Jar Jar fan theories on screen. Now, thanks to LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, he’s returned to voice the lovable Gungan in a very different context: as a Sith Master. “I wanted to do a dark version of Jar Jar,” says Best, “and then have these moments where it’s the Jar Jar you know and love. Which is this levity, this joy.”
While Best has more than 25 years playing the character to help ground his performance, co-stars and Star Wars newcomers Gaten Matarazzo and Tony Revolori used their own affinity for Star Wars lore to help guide them in creating the brothers Sig and Dev Greebling. For Matarazzo, the key source of inspiration was Luke Skywalker. “I think the perfect movie arc is your everyday person being whisked away on an incredible adventure,” he says. But Revolori’s Darth Dev called for two characters who are a little more conflicted: Anakin Skywalker and Knights of the Old Republic’s Darth Revan.
Along with the creators and fellow cast member Bobby Moynihan, Matarazzo, Revolori, and Best recently spoke with StarWars.com about their lifelong love of LEGO sets and Star Wars, and how the new animated series honors the past while creating a brand new story in the four-piece animated mashup now streaming on Disney+.
Classic building blocks
While Rebuild the Galaxy was Revolori and Matarazzo’s first Star Wars project, all three actors have fond LEGO memories from their childhoods.
Best remembers a sense of escape and accomplishment from building with LEGO bricks as a child and later the joy of putting together a set with his son. Revolori and Matarazzo also enjoyed playing with LEGO bricks as kids. “If you had LEGO [sets] you were the cool kid on the block,” says Revolori, who built with LEGO bricks over the years with both his older and younger brothers. The LEGO Star Wars video games were also very popular with Revolori and Matarazzo in their early years. “I played LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga religiously,” adds Matarazzo. “I could probably play it blindfolded from Episode I through VI. It’s a cornerstone of the video games I love now, and just a deep, deep childhood memory.” (We see what you just did there, Gaten!)
And like Star Wars, Best notes there’s a sense of community created by LEGO fans. “LEGO became this thing that you can do with the person that you love. There is so much camaraderie and community coming together when you start building LEGO first as a child with your friends or with your children as a parent,” Best says. “Star Wars is kind of the same thing. We all watched it as kids, we all found our favorite characters, and then we all played as those characters. It was this wonderful way to excite your imagination and be a part of a universe that you love and then create your own world around it.”
A familiar journey
Matarazzo describes his character, Sig Greebling, as a small town boy (nerf-herder by trade) who loves his brother and his friends. “He’s a bit of an introvert and a bit of a nerd, but he is A-OK with where he’s at in life,” Matarazzo says. “He is Force sensitive, which is not something he necessarily wants to be, but he ends up discovering his true self and his journey becoming a Force user.”
As Rebuild the Galaxy starts, Sig delights in telling his friends the tale of Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader, and Rebels who fought against the Empire and the First Order. A Star Wars fan in a Star Wars series made the character very relatable to Matarazzo. “What excited me about playing Sig was how similarly I felt to him growing up. I’m also a massive Star Wars fan, just like Sig,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily want to leave my hometown, but I was able to start going on really cool adventures. Any new fun reference to Star Wars that Sig would get excited about, I would be equally as excited about when I read it in the booth.”
While Luke Skywalker wanted off his small-town life on Tatooine faster than a racing fathier, Sig and Luke — one of Matarazzo’s favorite Star Wars characters — also had many similarities. “Anybody could have been Luke,” he says, “and that’s what’s so exciting about watching it: you put yourself in that world. You have this every day kid just experiencing it all for the first time the same way we all did when we watched Star Wars.”
Switching sides
Technically Revolori plays two characters in Rebuild the Galaxy: Dev Greebling, a nerf-herder eager to leave his home planet to create his own adventures, and Darth Devastator, Dev’s Sith alter ego. “There are different voices for both characters, but we see them intermingle with each other as well,” says Revolori. As he was preparing for the role, Revolori quickly linked Dev and Anakin Skywalker’s similar turns to the dark side, then he added another of his favorite Star Wars characters, Darth Revan, into the mix for his performance in Rebuild the Galaxy. All three move between the light and dark side of the Force in their story arcs. “I took a lot of inspiration from the emotionality of what [Revan] might be going through, and looking into that material to gain something more out of the character.”
Revolori, who’s primarily worked in front of the camera in roles including Graydon on the Willow series, noted how muted a voice performance can come across without visible facial expressions and body movements. “This is why the term ‘be more animated’ is actually a verb,” he says, noting that he wanted Darth Devastator to be both fun and menacing. “You really have to push a lot more emotion out of just your voice to get the performance to sound right.”
“Meesa tinken yousa people ganna die.”
Best relished the opportunity to bring an alternative version of Jar Jar Binks to the screen. Having played the light-hearted Gungan in the Star Wars prequel films, Best was well aware of the Darth Jar Jar internet creation — and was all for it. “The Darth Jar Jar theory has been out there for a very long time,” notes Best, “and it’s a theory I really liked. It was something I’ve always kind of wanted to explore in one way, shape, or form.”
While recording, Best wanted to do a darker version of his Jar Jar voice, coupled with moments that sound more like the classic Gungan. A fan of Star Wars reveals, Best pointed to the Darth Jar Jar stepping off the Dark Falcon (a re-imagined Millennium Falcon) as one of his favorite moments in the series.
Expanding the Star Wars universe by embracing inverted versions of characters is just one of the ways the series creates a love letter to both the Star Wars and LEGO universes. “Star Wars has always been about the fantasy of the galaxy far, far away,” says Best. “So I really love the combination of those two ideas of the Star Wars galaxy and these building blocks as a way to reimagine your idea of what Star Wars is.”
Read more from the creators and cast behind LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy in Part 1 of this two-piece StarWars.com series.
