10 Star Wars Moments Actors Didn't Know Were Coming
Hayden Christensen sure knows how to strike fear into the hearts of Jedi younglings.
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. That's how the saying goes. Just imagine the painstaking effort actors go to in order to learn their lines and marks for a role, to make sure they're as ready to go as possible.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that with all this preparation, actors can turn up to set every day and know exactly what's going to happen. But that's not always how it works.
This is arguably truer in terms of Star Wars than in most other projects. The secrecy surrounding any movie set in the galaxy far, far away is incredibly important, and is taken ridiculously seriously. A lot of the time, even the actors themselves are kept in the dark about what's going to happen, sometimes right up until they see the movie for themselves.
It's not just this secrecy that surprises actors on a Star Wars set, however. There's improvisation, plot points that have eluded them, and even things they forgot they did until watching it back themselves. These will all feature in this list, but first let's start with arguably the biggest secret in the history of cinema...
10. Nobody Knew About Luke Skywalker's Father - The Empire Strikes Back
Tyler Durden is really Edward Norton. Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time. Lotso was the real villain of Toy Story 3. All huge cinematic twists that stunned audiences, and yet, none of them hold a candle to the grandaddy of all shock revelations.
"No, I am your father" was iconic, and is still arguably the biggest twist in cinematic history. Even back in 1980, before the internet and the whole spoiler culture that led to Thanos demanding your silence, only a handful of people were allowed to know this twist.
That handful amounted to George Lucas, Mark Hamill, and director Irvin Kershner. No-one else knew that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father - not even the likes of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.
The big revelation in the original script was that Obi-Wan killed Luke's father, but after Kershner told Hamill the truth, he had to keep his mouth shut for a year and a half until everyone else found out at the premiere.