50 Roles for 50 Actors: Dream casting the Star Wars saga

Recasting the Star Wars saga: Gary Oldman as Qui-Gon Jinn

We’ve dealt with the student. Now let’s look at the master.

Actually, Qui-Gon Jinn is one of those roles that could probably still be played by the original actor. Liam Neeson did a respectable job with the part in The Phantom Menace and he could probably do a respectable job now. Still, rules are rules, and there are no repeats on this list.

So if Neeson is out, who’s in? What about Gary Oldman? The veteran English actor is around the right age for the part, and he could take a couple of notes from his role as the weary-but-decent Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and apply them to Qui-Gon Jinn. Oldman even kinda had Qui-Gon’s hairstyle when he played Sirius Black in the Harry Potter movies. He has this role in the bag.

Although Oldman is now identified with do-gooder roles like Gorden and Sirius, he was once known for playing harder-edged characters like Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK and Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy. Obviously, Qui-Gon falls mainly on the do-gooder side of this venn diagram, but Oldman could throw a bit of rebel yell energy in there. It often seemed like Qui-Gon was a bit of a rebel among the Jedi masters—remember how he insisted on training Anakin even though all the other Jedi told him it was a bad idea? It could be interesting to see Oldman flesh out those dimensions.

Next: The Queen of Naboo