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1 week ago
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The Star Wars prequels were not particularly enjoyable to sit through. All the matinee adventure serial action of the first three films were gone, replaced by long scenes about impenetrable galactic taxation systems, as performed by characters that seemed to have been designed purely for their potential to sell toys.
So bad were the prequels in fact, that realistically there is only one thing that could have possibly improved them. Of course, I am talking about the sight of Ray Winstone tearing around the set in a silly costume, drunk off his face. Only now do we understand how close this came to be.
Talking to Far Out recently, Winstone revealed that he auditioned for the part of Ruwee Naberrie, the father of Padmé Amidala, in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. And he would have got it, too, except for the fact that he turned up a little worse for wear. Or, as Winstone puts it, he was “pissed” and things “didn’t go well”.
In Winstone’s telling of the story, he rocked up to the audition having been up all night drinking, and immediately realised that he was “wrong for the part”. To make matters worse, Winstone claims that George Lucas yawned throughout the duration of the audition, prompting Winstone to declare “Why don’t we both have a 15-minute sleep and then I’ll fuck off?”
In the end the role went to the storied Australian actor Graeme Blundell, whose scenes ended up being deleted anyway. But would this have been the case had Lucas been brave enough to do the right thing and redrawn Naberrie as a hoarse, red-eyed, slurring cockney? Obviously not.
You have to remember that we’re talking about the Winstone of the early 00s here. Today he is best known for sleepwalking through television commercials for gambling sites and delivering legendarily inept Russian accents in forgettable Marvel films. But the Winstone of a quarter of a century ago was a fearsome presence indeed. This was the Winstone who had made Sexy Beast in 2000, and Nil By Mouth three years before that.
Imagine what that Winstone could have done with Star Wars. Far from being a side character so forgettable that people didn’t even notice when he briefly turned up in Episode III, Naberrie could have ended up being the undisputed king of the galaxy. He could have sauntered around outer space without a top on, sunburned and blistered from overexposure to the yellow sun of Naboo. He would have almost certainly called Anakin Skywalker the C-word.
And, clearly, given Disney’s current obsession with giving every imaginable Star Wars character their own spin-off series, Winstone’s Naberrie would have enjoyed a life that stretched far beyond the prequels. Chances are, had the audition gone his way, then we’d currently be in the middle of an entire Mandalorian-style franchise about a 70-year-old Naberrie roaming the wilds of the galaxy, stinking of whisky and chips, head-butting a ton of stormtroopers. His series would be called Ruwee Naberrie: Have It You Fanny, and it would be the best television show ever made.
But it wasn’t to be. At least the tale does have a somewhat happy ending, though. Despite missing the chance to turn a minor Star Wars character into an aggressively dribbling drunkard, Winstone did eventually get the chance to work with Lucas, in the role of George McHale in the film where Indiana Jones survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a fridge.
Winstone says that his casting in that film might be down to the fact that Lucas “didn’t remember” his drunk Star Wars audition. But perhaps he did. Perhaps this was his attempt to correct a historic wrong. And if that’s the case, then it still isn’t too late to act on it.
Because, if Lucas is known for anything at all, it’s for tinkering with his films long after they’ve been released. Who’s to say that, right now, he isn’t sat in an editing bay in Nicasio, painstakingly grafting CGI footage of a drunk Winstone into the background of every single shot of the Star Wars films? Winstone stumbling around on the Death Star. Winstone vomiting down himself as he does a loop the loop in an X-Wing. Winstone trying to hump the back of R2-D2’s head. This is the version of Star Wars that the world deserves, and it cannot come quickly enough.
