The internet has been buzzing lately with the big news of Disney buying LucasFilm and the even bigger news that Star Wars Episode VII is now in the pipeline.
What started off just a few days ago as the mention of a movie has now turned into what sounds like actual pre-production, with EW getting the exclusive story that Harrison Ford (Colonel Graff in Ender’s Game), Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill are all up for making appearances in the film. Today, Vulture reported that Michael Arndt is being lined up to write the script.
With all this talk of Star Wars going on, eventually I began to wonder: whatever happened to that little kid that everyone blamed for Episode I being a suckfest? After some Google searching and YouTube videos, I found a rather sad story of a kid who grew up being endlessly teased about being Anakin Skywalker and ended up taking the brunt of the fandom’s anger over the film in general. Add to that, he claims he was made to do up to 60 interviews a day. That’s brutal for an adult. He was ten.
I was as disappointed in The Phantom Menace as everyone else was. I’d grown up on Star Wars and when I finally sat in the theater after waiting for months, watching the trailer over and over, and sitting in a snaking line that took me all the way into some hot and humid parking garage in Waikiki, I couldn’t believe how different it was and how apparent it was that the magic was simply gone. And I’m ashamed to say that I criticized little Jake Lloyd’s performance along with everyone else.
Still, I did this among friends. Back then I had no blog. There was no Twitter and Facebook was still restricted to certain colleges. As a fan you could pretty harmlessly criticize an actor without them feeling the sting of it. But apparently there were tons of kids and fans out there who did know him and who did make his life miserable. And there seem to be a lot of people that think he has no right to complain simply because, hey, he got to be Anakin Skywalker.
He’s destroyed all his Star Wars memorabilia and has been criticized for blaming George Lucas for what he went through but really, is he wrong?
Jake Lloyd did not write the script. He did not make up those ridiculous lines and he did not direct himself in the movie. He was ten years old for crying out loud. A child. And really, how do you place the weight of the Star Wars franchise onto the shoulders of a 10 year-old boy?
You don’t. Or at least, George Lucas shouldn’t have.
Which brings me to Ender Wiggin and Asa Butterfield. If there’s been any one major complaint about this movie (and I’m sure the discussion will continue to heat up quite a bit over the next year) it’s the fact that Asa Butterfield is 15 years old and Ender Wiggin was five when he left home for Battle School. I’ve written about this topic before and will continue to defend the studio’s decision to age Ender up because the fact of the matter is, when you have a large fanbase counting on a movie adaptation as centered upon a character as it is on Ender, it’s not a good idea to base all your hopes and expectations on a child.
I mean, how real does this experience have to be for us to have our “true” Ender? Do we have to mentally stress some little kid to the point of a nervous breakdown as Graff and Anderson tried to do for so many years? The answer is no, simply because we’re not the International Fleet and this is just a movie.
Sure, they could have searched the world for a 5-10 year-old actor to play Ender, but I think a book that has been around for 30 years and has been studied in schools for almost as long needs to have an older actor who is better equipped for the work both during and after production and needs to be able to deal with the modern backlash that can happen if all doesn’t go as planned.
After writing and watching how things work in the movie business, I have only a small glimpse of what child actors go through and with the legions of vicious cyber bullies on Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook, I can only imagine how much worse it can be for them now than it was for Jake Lloyd 13 years ago.
And while I’m not saying Ender’s Game is going to be as big as a Star Wars movie, the same concept applies to any body of work that has a large fandom sitting out there waiting.
I’ve briefly met Asa and he seems to have a great head on his shoulders. He takes his online presence in stride and is very well composed on the red carpet, crediting his mother for dressing him and charming those he speaks to and works with on set. This is a boy properly equipped to deal with the side effects of playing Ender Wiggin. I find it hard to believe that a much younger actor would come out of this experience as unscathed and unphased as he probably will.
As for Jake Lloyd, he has my apologies and he has my sympathies. None of it was really his fault and I wish Lucas had had the foresight to age his little Anakin up for the sake of a young boy’s childhood and young adulthood.
Nonso Anozie spoke recently with Ebony Magazine about his role as Sergeant Dap in Ender’s Game.
It’s tough to follow a celebrity such as Harrison Ford that doesn’t have Twitter, but The Telegraph in Macon, GA reports that Ford arrived in town yesterday to begin filming his next movie ’42’, a Jackie Robinson biopic set in the 1940s.
A slew of actors were reported to be officially joining the cast of Ender’s Game today, with Harrison Ford being cast as Colonel Hyram Graff and Abigail Breslin as Ender’s sister Valentine Wiggin.