10 Background Actors In Star Wars Who Got Themselves Noticed
These Star Wars extras caught everyone's attention.
Generally the job of a movie extra - or rather, "background artist" - is to add believable ambiance to a scene while not drawing attention to themselves.
But sometimes a distinctive-looking or "ambitious" extra might end up pulling the audience's attention away from what the director wants them to focus on, and in the Star Wars franchise, that's certainly happened a lot.
The hit sci-fi series has of course roped in literally thousands of extras across its many movie productions, and so it's simply a numbers game that at least a few of them are going to end up making a mark with viewers.
Picking just 10 isn't easy, and we deliberately excluded the infamous clumsy Stormtrooper because, to be honest, it's just a little too obvious.
These background actors were all supposed to blend into their scene naturally, but each caught the eye of inquisitive fans, to the extent that some are even fully fleshed-out characters in the wider Star Wars universe.
And yet, because some of these unexpectedly iconic parts were played by uncredited extras, we still don't know who they are...
10. Willrow Hood
Star Wars extras don't get much more iconic than the legend that is Willrow Hood.
Hood was a Cloud City resident who appeared on-screen for a mere second in The Empire Strikes Back, running past the screen holding a mysterious white device during Darth Vader's assault on the locale.
Because the item Hood is holding seems to be an ice cream maker, he has largely gone by the nickname "Ice Cream Maker Guy" for the last four decades, despite receiving an official name in 1997's Star Wars Customisable Card Game.
Fans found the character's urgency to evacuate himself with his precious desert-making machine so amusing that Hood has become a most unexpectedly popular cosplay character.
The annual Star Wars Celebration fan event even organises a "Running of the Hoods," whereby fans dress up as the character and run around the convention center with their ice cream makers in tow.
The mythology went even deeper more recently, though, when The Mandalorian "revealed" - that is, retconned - the device to be a safe known as a camtono.
Sadly despite some spirited attempts to identify the uncredited actor who played Hood, he's never been located or come forward. One can only hope he's aware of the positive impact he's had on so many lives.