Peter Ramsey, the Oscar-winning co-director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, directed last week’s fourth episode of the Disney+ Ahsoka series and has shared how Hayden Christensen felt, stating it had “a lot of meaning for him.”
“I told Dave [Filoni], ‘man, you gave me a foolproof episode,’ ” he told IGN in an interview. “I so lucked out because I got the one where all these different strands of the story kind of converge and it blows up. You’d have to really mess up in order for it not to be compelling in the end.”
Not only was that reunion a big one for fans, but for the actors as well, Ramsey said, speaking to what it was like to shoot that scene with Christensen.
“He’s a really sweet, low-key guy,” Ramsey said. “He was pretty happy about being there after all this time. It had a lot of meaning for him.”
As fans of The Clone Wars animated series know, Ahsoka and Anakin have a long, complicated history, going back to Ahsoka’s teenage apprenticeship in that series and leading up to their painful confrontation in Rebels. But again, this is a different Anakin, one before the events of Revenge of the Sith, and Ramsey had a certain strategy of evoking a tenderness out of Christensen.
“We just talked about what it’s like for him to be seeing Ahsoka after all this time, that it’s a reunion for them,” he said. “And I just told him, ‘it’s like you haven’t seen your daughter in two years. She’d gone off to college and you’re seeing her again and she’s like a different person but still your daughter.’ “
That note of direction, as Ramsey added, had a bit of extra meaning given the fact that Christensen has a young daughter of his own.
“On the Rosario side of it,” he continued, “she knew what it meant in the story and it was just about selling the idea that she was waking up somewhere really having no clue as to what was going on, not understanding ‘am I dead? Am I alive? Am I where I think I could be?’ And the way that expression changes at the very end when she sees him and says his name is so sweet and it was just like her turning back the person she was the last time she saw him.”
In a nice callback to The Clone Wars, Anakin greets her by saying “hello, snips,” the nickname he gave her back in the day. I had a slight hunch that that opening line had a bit of Matt Lanter, the actor who voiced Anakin in The Clone Wars, in it, but Ramsey said that as far as he knows, it was just Christensen.
Read more from the interview at the link below.
