Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker was nearly played by a very different actor

One classic teen heartthrob actor has revealed that they were very close to being cast as Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequel films, and honestly? I think they’d have been pretty decent.

Although it’s hard to see anyone except Hayden Christensen in the role these days, it sounds like one actor missed out on taking his place by a small technicality: Ryan Phillippe was deemed slightly too old to star alongside Natalie Portman.

“Being a kid born in the ’70s, I was like, ‘What a dream that would’ve been,'” Phillippe revealed to Entertainment Weekly.

“But I think things happen for a reason and it’s easy to make peace with that…”

So, is Phillippe particularly bent out of shape about missing out on the role now? Nope. It sounds like he’s very much come to terms with things.

“Part of what we have to develop as actors is that thick skin that comes along with rejection or maybe things not going the way you wanted in a particular project or potential job…” he continued.

“There’s an element of being able to let go and release and not spend too much time thinking about those things…”

I genuinely think Phillippe would have been brilliant in the role, so it’s a little sad to hear that he missed out on the role simply because he was a few years older than Portman (especially considering you could barely tell he and Christensen weren’t the same age at the time).

Still, they made the right choice in the end. Although people made fun of Hayden Christensen for his wooden acting in the prequel films at the time, he’s proven that he’s a genuinely great actor since.

His choice to portray Anakin as a whiny little brat who couldn’t get a grip on his temper tantrums was clearly a choice that critics just didn’t really understand back in the early 2000s, but with hindsight we can tell that he absolutely crushed it.