10 Insane Ways Directors Appeared In Their Own Movies
8. George Lucas Is A Badass Hero After The Fact
Really, it's a surprise that it took George Lucas as long as it did to appear on screen in Star Wars. It's not like the director was shy about stepping in front of the camera in his friends' movies. John Landis got him to be frustrated by Eddie Murphy's theme park queue jumping in Beverly Hills Cop III, while in Steven Spielberg's Hook he can be seen getting off with Carrie Fisher on a bridge as Tinkerbell sprinkles them with fairy dust.
He didn't show up on screen in his signature franchise, though, until his final Star Wars movie: Revenge Of The Sith. He can be spotted under a load of blue makeup attending the opera just before Palpatine's big Darth Plagueis monologue.
Nothing particularly insane so far. But this is Star Wars, so of course every minor background character has a major backstory. It turns out that Lucas isn't playing just any old blue-faced opera goer. He's playing galactic senator Baron Notluwiski Papanoida and he has his own big heroic storyline.
Five years after the movie came out, Lucas's daughter Katie (who cameod alongside him in Revenge Of The Sith as Papanoida's daughter) penned a whole episode of The Clone Wars TV series entirely dedicated to retroactively making her father's single shot opera goer into an amazing covert agent and gun-toting badass hero, rescuing her own character from the clutches of Jabba alongside the series's heroine Ahsoka Tano.
Oh, and if that's not odd enough, Lucas also provided the coughing sounds for General Grievous.