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

Dream casting the Star Wars saga: Shailene Woodley as Sabé

If you don’t remember, Sabé is the name of Queen Amidala’s body double, the one who subs in for her a few times during The Phantom Menace before getting blown up in Attack of the Clones. It’s a bit of a thankless part, but someone’s gotta do it.

In fact, the role is so thankless that some people may not realize that Sabé was originally played by Keira Knightley in Menace, a few years before she scored her own big movie franchise with Pirates of the Caribbean. Still, Knightley did a good job, which is to say she looked and sounded enough like Portman to be effective. If Jennifer Lawrence is going to play Padmé in our remake, we’ll have to find someone who can convincingly look like her, at least with pounds of makeup applied.

How about Insurgent star Shailene Woodley? Woodley was born just a year later than Lawrence, and the two actresses share a similar facial structure, not to mention similar scratchy voices. Also, Insurgent is basically a poor man’s version of The Hunger Games, which makes Woodley a poor man’s version of Jennifer Lawrence. So it is in life, so shall it be on the screen. What better person to play Lawrence’s hypothetical body double?

Next: Young (really young) Anakin Skywalker