How Ahmed Best Survived the Fandom Menace
Posted: 2017-07-19 03:12pm
https://www.wired.com/2017/07/ahmed-bes ... w-podcast/
I didn't know he was into tech stuff.The call from George Lucas came in the summer of 1999, while Ahmed Best was out for a walk in New York City’s Washington Square Park. It was like a lifeline. At that moment, the then-25-year-old actor and musician was on screens across the world, starring in one of the biggest movies of the year, if not the decade: Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. Thanks to pre-emptively ecstatic press leading up to the film’s release, Best’s face had been everywhere, grinning widely from the covers of Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, and even landing a corner flap on the front of Time magazine. But because he’d always been in character as Jar Jar Binks, his CGI-assisted alter ego, Best’s fellow parkgoers likely didn’t recognize him that day. Which means they couldn’t have known they were in the presence of the most hated-upon alien in the galaxy.
For the previous few weeks, Jar Jar and Best had been the twin villains of the internet, with Best’s performance eliciting all sorts of ire-ridden accusations: that Jar Jar was a kiddie-pleasing drag who was wesa– and mesa-ing his way through a grown-up movie; that he’d been crassly concocted by George Lucas solely to sell more toys; that he was a buffoonish, borderline-racist caricature. These days, such pop-culture controversies are usually snuffed out within a few weeks and swiftly replaced with more up-to-date outrages. But the Jar Jar jeremiad lasted for years. A site called JarJarMustDie.com was launched before the film’s release, and numerous fan forums emanated a loud, shared anti-Gungan din. Best’s creation was so toxic that a Jar Jar gag wound up being jammed at the last minute into that year’s South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, and in 2000 a Star Wars fan released a homemade version of Menace—dubbed The Phantom Edit—that pared down some of Binks’ antics.
By the time Lucas called, Best was stuck in a cruel limbo that few actors experience—a state of being infamous and anonymous, all at once. “It’s really difficult to articulate the feeling,” Best says now. “You feel like a success and a failure at the exact same time. I was staring at the end of my career before it started.”
Throughout the controversy, Best had largely remained quiet. But Lucas wanted to talk. “George said, ‘This happened with the Ewoks. It happened with Chewbacca. It happened with Lando Calrissian,’” Best recalled. “He was used to this. He knew what was going to happen.”
Twenty years from now, Lucas said, things were going to be very different, and people were going to see this character in a new way. Best just needed to focus on the future.
Even if you were the kind of Star Wars true believer who found it impossible to like Jar Jar Binks, trust me: You’d have an even harder time disliking Ahmed Best. We meet on a midsummer Sunday morning in Los Angeles. Best, now 43, is wearing a sky-blue Henley shirt, tan pants, and thick-framed black glasses. He is tall and fit, with an easy smile and a tattoo across his right arm that reads “Fighting Without Fighting”—a reference to Enter the Dragon, his second-favorite movie of all time (The Empire Strikes Back is number one). “My father was a martial arts teacher,” Best says. “And when my mom went into labor with me and my twin brother, he said, ‘Let’s go see Enter the Dragon.’ When Bruce Lee came on the screen, I was like, ‘It’s time to get out this womb, and into the world.’”
The week had been a busy one for Best. The night before, he’d helped coordinate visuals for a multimedia live show celebrating the music of the late hip-hop producer J Dilla. And a few days before that, Best had launched The Afrofuturist Podcast, a new series in which he interviews authors, creators, and technologists about where things are heading. It’s a show about the future that’s closely linked to Best’s past. “For Star Wars, I was a part of this new hybrid-performance technology that eventually ended up changing movies,” he says. “That put me in this very, very forward-thinking mindset.”
Best has been interested in technology since childhood. He spent his early years in the Bronx before his family relocated to Maplewood, New Jersey. “Growing up, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, or a computer scientist, or a physicist,” he says. “I didn’t realize you could do a bunch of stuff and be a polymath, because at that time everybody was like, ‘Figure out that one thing that you’re great at, and do that one thing.’”
As it turned out, Best was pretty great at computers: He learned BASIC programming, started working with music software, and, along with a friend, sold books via a rudimentary retail site he launched (and quickly abandoned) in the early ’90s. “People we were hanging out with were like, ‘Whatever, nerds,’” he says, laughing. “But we saw the potential of the web really early on.”
In his late teens, Best moved on to music—studying percussion, playing with the New York City-based acid-jazz collective Jazzhole, and eventually landing a role in the award-winning theatrical production Stomp. “We did an open call where about 600 people turned up to audition, and Ahmed stood out straight away,” Stomp co-creator Luke Cresswell says. “We were looking for charisma and for people with something to say. And the best thing about Ahmed was the fact he was so confident and so self-assured. He could be loud, he could be opinionated. But those are all qualities that pushed him to where he is now.”
Best puts it a bit more bluntly: “I was very arrogant in Stomp,” he says. “The show came from street performers in Brighton, and British performers have always been a little bit acerbic, in a ‘The fuck you looking at?’ kind of way. And we were New York kids, street performers. So that [attitude] was right up our alley.”
By the spring of 1996, Best had earned a lead role in the show’s San Francisco company. One night, Lucasfilm casting director Robin Gurland wound up in the audience, trying to find someone who could play a new kind of film character—one that would be rendered digitally on-screen, but drawn from an actor’s performance. The search was taking forever. “Jar Jar was one of the last roles we cast,” Gurland says. “I was looking for someone who could really sell the physical aspect of the character, but who also had the acting chops to give it a literal voice—and it’s very difficult to find that in one performer.”
Best didn’t know Gurland was watching the performance, which was probably a good thing. That night, an out-of-town Stomper was visiting the city, so Best was relegated to a supporting role, leaving him fuming. “I turned into an asshole that night,” Best says. “I thought, ‘If you think you can out-anything on me onstage, you got another fucking thing coming, and I’m going to prove it.’ And I did. Had I been a little bit older, I would’ve handled that a little bit more gracefully.”
But Best’s show-offy turn wound up winning over Gurland. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him,” she says. “There’s an unknown quality that true performers have—the ability to relate to an audience and to come across as if they’re directing their performance to you specifically.” She eventually invited him to Skywalker Ranch, where Best was squeezed into a tight-fitting motion-capture suit and asked to move about. (When Lucas himself eventually showed up, Best broke into what was once described as a “break-dance glide.”) Not long afterward, he was summoned overseas to begin his work as Jar Jar. His Star Wars saga had begun.
On an early morning in 1997, Best stood in a hut in the middle of a wide stretch of desert in Tunisia, getting tucked into part of his Jar Jar outfit. Crew members were hovering about, and the heat was promising to once again break the three-digit barrier, but Best was calmly, quietly nuh-nuh-nuh-ing a familiar tune: The Star Wars theme. Like millions of other Star Wars devotees in the mid- to late-’90s, Best couldn’t suppress his excitement for The Phantom Menace.
Maybe you were one of the faithful, too. If so, you might want to rewatch Lucas’ epically awaited Menace, which remains an unsettling and illuminating experience two decades after its release—sometimes in ways you don’t expect. Granted, the film still whips up some of that same elemental despair and exhaustion it did back on opening day (a phrase like “The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute” gives new meaning to the term “opening crawl”). But its keynote scenes—such as the eerily meditative Jedi showdown with Darth Maul or the sky-skimming podrace—are far more exciting now, when they can be viewed without impossible-to-satisfy circa-1999 expectations. And many of the digital vistas Lucas conjured up are lush and imaginative, especially when compared with the recent Star Wars sequels, which have adhered closely to the original trilogy’s aesthetics.
As for Jar Jar, he’s perhaps more vital to the movie than viewers realized at the time, partly because Menace isn’t exactly the yippee-ist entry in the Star Wars universe: By the movie’s end, a beloved mentor has died, a kid has been separated from his mother, and several trade routes remain stubbornly in dispute. Jar Jar is the film’s sole source of light, and there are moments when his serene obliviousness—like saying “Hello, boyos” to a bunch of droids—is at least relief from the dread.
And Best retains the character’s elastic physicality and jumpy eagerness throughout the movie, despite being yoked with a still-in-the-works technology and disguised under layers of digital makeup. “I did my job,” he says. “I was believable enough for you to believe that this character existed. George said do a thing, I did a thing, you know what I mean? The fact that you hate Jar Jar—I still did the job.”
Best had seen the original movies countless times as a kid, so getting the role of Jar Jar made him the luckiest Star Wars fan in the world—which may be why he approached the role with Sith-like seriousness. In a recent episode of the movie-obsessed podcast I Was There Too, Best outlined some of the obstacles involved in going Gungan: There was that time he quietly endured a costume fitting right after a flight attendant spilled scalding hot tea on his lap, worried he’d lose the role if he spoke up. And there was the strange backstage encounter with Lucas and Michael Jackson, who’d lobbied the director for the part of Jar Jar—only to find out Best had landed it instead.
Mostly, though, Best’s memories of making The Phantom Menace are good ones: “We laughed all day long,” he says. In the behind-the-scenes doc The Beginning: Making ‘Episode 1’, you can see Best strutting playfully around the set, a fake Jar Jar visage on his head, as he prepares to film some early screen tests. (You can also spot Lucas, in a purple dad shirt, awkwardly demonstrating the character’s loping walk.) At the time of Phantom’s release, Jar Jar was promoted as a technological marvel, one that had been brought to life by ILM’s innovative motion-capture techniques and digital advances. But without Best, the character’s loose-limbed, goof-typhoon persona would likely never have translated to screen. “George and I watched Buster Keaton movies together, and talked about him,” Best says. “Some of the Jar Jar scenes are direct Buster Keaton scenes.”
So Best wasn’t prepared for the response that summer, when Jar Jar was all but declared a menace in his own right. There were accusations that the character was a throwback to racially charged stereotypes from the early 20th century (the Wall Street Journal review called Jar Jar “a Rastafarian Stepin Fetchit on platform hoofs, crossed annoyingly with Butterfly McQueen”). “I was shocked with the racial implications,” Best says now, “but always knew they had little to no merit.”
The majority of the complaints focused on the character’s child-like klutziness and cluelessness. Older Star Wars fans were the harshest, offended by the presence of a high-pitched, high-energy, floppy-eared amphibian in what they considered a grownup galaxy. “I had death threats through the internet,” Best says. “I had people come to me and say, ‘You destroyed my childhood.’ That’s difficult for a 25-year-old to hear.”
But as Best’s friend Seth Green notes, the Star Wars lovers who rejected Jar Jar’s kid-pleasing shenanigans weren’t the character’s target audience in the first place. “When Episode One came out, it was after many years of no Star Wars,” says Green, a co-creator of Robot Chicken and a longtime Star Wars aficionado. “Fans who were young kids when the original trilogy came out were now adults with kids of their own, and they were trying to compare this new film to feelings accumulated over their entire lives of loving and re-watching the original trilogy…Obviously, adults wouldn’t like Jar Jar. But Ahmed didn’t deserve any scorn.”
Because Best was online and connected to the greater Star Wars fan community, he couldn’t avoid the blowback. Two of the forces that had shaped his creative life—the fandom of Star Wars and the freedom of the web—had been turned against him, and the abuse he endured was a sign of how the internet, even in the pre-Twitter era, could both personalize and dehumanize a pop-culture figure all at once.
“There were a lot of tears, there was a lot of pain, there was a lot of shit I had to deal with,” Best says. He takes a break from his meal, and leans back in his seat. “Everybody else went on. Everybody else worked. Everybody else was accepted by the zeitgeist.”
Best lives in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Los Feliz, in a house featuring a home studio in the back, where he records music—and, lately, episodes of The Afrofuturist Podcast. He first moved to the city in 2000, to capitalize on his post-Phantom momentum. But he had trouble finding satisfying work. “I did a bunch of movies that I wasn’t 100 percent proud of just to pay the bills,” he says. “To be honest, failing and being black is very scary, because we don’t get a lot of chances, you know? I didn’t get another chance after Jar Jar. No one said, ‘You know, that didn’t work. But I believe in you, and you’re a good actor.’ I didn’t get another chance. I just struck out. But as soon as I started doing my own thing, that’s when things took off.”
As it turned out, one of Best’s first realizations of what a post-Star Wars career could look like came to him on the set of a Star Wars movie. While working on 2002’s Attack of the Clones—in which Jar Jar was downgraded to a minimal role—he helped produce On Location with Ahmed Best, a starwars.com series in which he interviewed cast and crew members, and an early experiment in web video. “At that time, I didn’t want to be a ‘host,’ because that was a trajectory that you had to be like a standup comedian to follow,” he says. “But I really liked talking to people who weren’t normally talked to.”
That impulse would be set aside for a few years, as Best turned to martial arts—he claims a black belt in jiu-jitsu—while creating and starring in short films and web series and occasionally popping up in network dramas like Law & Order: LA. He also landed a steady run of voiceover gigs in video games and TV series, including an Annie-winning appearance on Robot Chicken, for which he reprised his Jar Jar role.
By 2011, he was ready to head back to school, enrolling in an MFA program at the American Film Institute. He was almost 20 years older than most of his classmates, which was unnerving. But he spent the next few years immersing himself in classes on Method acting and direction, eventually working on web series like The Nebula, a spoof of sci-fi TV franchises. “That was really one of the first things I did on my own,” he says. “It really just put this thing in my mind where I was like, ‘I have to keep doing this.’”
While at school, he focused on figuring out how and why viewers forge emotional connections with the performers in front of them. It was around this time he also started thinking again about Jar Jar: Why didn’t this seemingly innocuous character—the result of so much devotion and time from Best, not to mention dozens of others—work with audience members?
“There is a heart to Jar Jar that people don’t really get,” Best says. “He is the most loyal character in Star Wars ever. As Qui-Gon and Jar Jar are walking through the forest, he says, ‘I owe you a life debt.’” But that sincere moment is soon eclipsed. “The jokes take over, and the slapstick takes over, and the physical comedy takes over,” he says. Ultimately, Best settled on the same answer some Phantom fans did nearly 20 years ago: “He was a little bit on the nose.”
In recent years, the Phantom Menace fans who adored Jar Jar when they were kids have attempted to redefine his legacy, at least online. There are numerous “In Defense of Jar Jar Binks” essays, not to mention an extensive (and sincere) [Jar Jar Binks Appreciation Thread on the long-running site TheForce.net. But the character’s most substantive stab at pop-culture rehab was a fan theory that first appeared on Reddit in October 2015, which quickly circulated around the web. It posited that Jar Jar Binks was secretly a Force-trained Sith who’d been quietly assisting Senator Palpatine in his rise to power (evidence includes: Jar Jar’s Jedi-like gesticulations, his inexplicable combat acumen, the fact that he and Palpatine share a home planet).
Whether or not his character was actually a secret insurrectionist doesn’t really matter; what does matter is that, years after Menace’s release, people are finally starting to take Jar Jar Binks seriously—much to Best’s delight. “There are so many layers to Jar Jar that people did not look at,” Best says, “because everyone was ready to be angry.”
Here’s what the (immediate) future looks like for Best: He’s directing a play in the fall and developing a comedy series, 2 Black Dudes, with executive producer Seth MacFarlane. He also has ideas for a live-performance web show, to be taped in his home studio.
And he’s pushing ahead with the The Afrofuturist Podcast, which has only rolled out a handful of episodes so far, in which Best talks with academics and executives about everything from artificial intelligence to the future of education (a new episode is due this week).
“I wanted to talk to people who are looking at where we’ll be 30 years from now, 100 years from now, 10,000 years from now,” Best says. “Black Americans don’t really think like that—but historically they did. African people created civilizations based on the future: They created astrological and astronomical instruments to track the equinox and the solstice; they created language and architecture that would supersede their existence at the time. Science and technology began with that African-centric mindset. It was always about: ‘What’s next?’”
One of Best’s dream guests, he says, is Lucas himself. The two occasionally still talk, though Best says he’s closer to Menace costars Natalie Portman and Ewan McGregor. “I’d like to have the definitive Jar Jar episode with him,” Best says. “I would really want to know how he saw that this type of filmmaking was going to be pretty ubiquitous. And I’d want to ask him why he went there.”
As brunch is winding down, I ask Best—one of the few Star Wars fans to ever find himself tractor-beamed into Lucas’ world—what he thinks of the more recent sequels. His verdict? Enjoyable, but risk-free. “You’re not on the edge of your seat,” he says. “You’re there for the spectacle. You’re there for the nostalgia.”
But Best knows how these things go. Twenty years from now, he might feel differently. After all, in the Star Wars galaxy, as in the real world, a new future is never too far, far away.
