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Primetime Emmy Award-winner Lee Jung-jae told Entertainment Weekly that when he was cast to play a Jedi Master he focused on one thing: Star Wars.
“I didn't really want to be influenced by anything outside of the Star Wars world,” he said.
What he wanted to do was delve into a galaxy far, far away so that he could do his role of Master Sol on The Acolyte, which premiered Tuesday, June 4, justice.
“I definitely was inspired by a lot of past Jedi Masters and the wonderful actors that played them. And one of my favorite characters was Qui-Gon Jinn, played by Liam Neeson. I really kind of tried to find the connective tissue between him and my character, Master Sol,” the Squid Game actor relayed through an interpreter.
Bringing Qui-Gon Jinn in spirit to The Acolyte
The callback to the wise yet stubborn Qui-Gon gives us insight to what sort of Jedi Sol is going to be as he tries to deal with a new threat towards the end of the High Republic era.
And even though Jedis have all but trademarked stoicism in their part of the galaxy, it was Master Sol's range of emotions that Lee gravitated to.
“He is a Jedi master, but the more I saw the script, I realized that there were more of these humanistic elements to him,” the Korean actor said.
“His emotions are constantly in flux. And also, when he's in battle, he actually does feel that element of fear. And I think because of that, [showrunner Leslye Hedland] really created a Sol that was extremely humanistic. And she did that with the other characters as well — they all embody such a diversity of emotions, just like regular people. And in each character, you see those elements really clearly,” he further explained.
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Lightsaber-fu
Lee said he particularly enjoyed the lightsaber and fight training. Although he considered himself a non-novice for some of the training since he had done a few action scenes in Korea, notably as a mixed martial arts fighter in the 2014 action comedy film Big Match.
“I've actually done a lot of action in my previous projects in Korea, so when I entered the two months of training camp, I noticed that the fight choreographers, they started teaching for the basics. And a part of me was like, ‘Oh, I kind of know all of this already,'” he said.
There's always something to be said about going back to the basics, learning the foundation of pretty much anything — even for a Jedi Master.
“But then I realized that as the training continued, those basics that we practiced over and over again, it really helped doing these stunts and the fight choreography on set,” Lee noted.
Just like his inspiration, Neeson had already trained as a boxer before he took on the role of Qui-Gon Jinn. Neeson, for his part, took his queue to play a wise and noble “monk” who knew martial arts from watching Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai.
Star Wars: The Acolyte is available to stream on Disney+.
