Taika Waititi is developing a Star Wars project and yet somehow forgot that his Thor: Love and Thunder star was none other than Padmé Amidala!
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Waititi admitted that he asked Natalie Portman, whose tenure as Padmé (Anakin’s wife and Luke and Leia’s mother) spanned three movies, if she wanted to act in Star Wars.
“Natalie said to me, what do you do next? And I said ‘I’m trying to work on a Star Wars thing. Have you ever wanted to be in a Star Wars movie?’ She said, ‘I’ve been in Star Wars movies.’ I forgot about those ones. [Laughs]”
We’re not sure if he was offering her a role or was just making conversation. Perhaps he was going to offer her a role but is now too embarrassed to do so—or else he realized that Padmé’s inclusion would ruin the continuity.
As for what his Star Wars thing is, your guess is as good as ours. Not much has been revealed to the public, and Waititi has given weird, rambling, sometimes contradictory, answers. One example came later in the same interview:
“I saw on Twitter, someone’s like: I’d actually really love to see a movie about Chewbacca’s grandmother. And I was like, I shouldn’t have said that because this is awesome! But I just feel like for me, I’m never gonna please the fans. You know, I don’t want to mess with something that’s so treasured. Also, you feel like you’ve got to do a lot of research . . . and I don’t have any time. [Laughs] I mean, there’s thousands of books that have been written, these volumes of books about Star Wars with all those characters. I just don’t have time to get through them. So I can’t say like, you know, confidently, I’d be able to do something that’s like very close to what everyone knows. I’m not promising that I’m not going to do anything like that. I’m just saying: It’d be easier for me to not do that. Would you like to see a Jar Jar Binks movie?”
You probably won’t forget about Portman as the breathtaking Jane Foster in Thor: Love and Thunder, which premieres in the coming days.