Ahmed Best, the actor best known for playing Jar-Jar Binks, is familiar with how cruel certain segments of the Star Wars fandom can be and has shown his support for another actor in need of support, The Acolyte‘s Amandla Stenberg. Following the news that Disney announced they were canceling The Acolyte, a certain group of individuals decided to go onto Amandla Stenberg’s social media post and celebrate the cancelation of the series, showing the cruel vitriol that had followed The Acolyte since the series was announced. On August 28, 2024, Stenberg took to social media to make a post that both showed her appreciation for the fans who had embraced the series while also calling out the racist comments they and the series received during its run.
Ahmed Best certainly knows what Stenberg is going through and took to Instagram to make a post in support with the caption saying, “I will always stand in solidarity for artists who give 110% to their work and art. Keep shining queen.” Best received a great deal of fan hate back in 1999 for playing Jar-Jar Binks following the premiere of The Phantom Menace and has spoken openly about how the sheer amount of harassment made him contemplate suicide. See Best’s post below.
Best and Stenberg certainly are not isolated incidents with Star Wars involving a certain subset of people who refer to themselves as fans crossing a line of harassment, all under the guise of “critiquing” the writing and while still attacking the performers who have no control over it. In addition to Best, his fellow prequel stars Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christensen received a lot of hate from the Star Wars fanbase. Like Best, Christensen knows what it is like to be on the other end of fan hatred and even recorded a special video welcoming Stenberg to the Star Wars franchise. While actors like Christensen and Best have now since been welcomed into the Star Wars fandom, fans are clearly still forcing newcomers to the saga to face the same level of cruel comments the prequel actors faced.
Daisy Ridley had to step away from social media following the swaths of negative comments she received for playing Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. The level of hate, racist, and sexist comments heaped on Kelly Marie Tran for her role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi should have been the reckoning that the Star Wars fandom needed to look at itself and reflect, but instead, some voices doubled down and made selling negativity their whole brand. Obi-Wan Kenobi star Ewan McGregor had to make a social media post in response to the racist comments his co-star Moses Ingram received for playing Reva, even saying those who would say such terrible things are “not Star Wars fans.”
One thing that is present in many of these, from Kelly Marie Tran to Moses Ingram to Ahmed Best and now Amandla Stenberg, is they are all people of color, with both Tran and Ingram being women and Stenberg using they/them pronounces. This is a problem that is becoming frequently associated with the Star Wars brand – to the point Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has warned actors to prepare for the backlash – but has also been seen across many other popular movie franchises, most notably the Marvel Cinematic Universe.