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Welcome back to the Homing Beacon, the official Star Wars email Newsletter
When Ashley Eckstein received a call to audition for a Star Wars project, she was at first doubtful at the likelihood of landing the role. Her try-out session was not for Ahsoka Tano; rather, she was asked to audition for Padmé Amidala.
"I'm usually pretty good at doing impersonations because I've done a lot sketch comedy," says Eckstein, "but for some reason, I just wasn't mastering Natalie Portman's voice. My agent said, 'go in anyway, because you never know!'"
Turns out, they were both right. In the midst of uttering the first line of Amidala dialogue, Ashley was interrupted with word that her voice was too high. "But what was so neat was that they said, we'd like you to audition for another role. A new role. That's all I knew. They didn't give out any details."
This new role still remained veiled in secrecy. Eckstein was prompted to try out a variety of accents with varying degrees of success. "I did not do very well, in my opinion," she admits, "but somehow I happen to get a callback."
It was what happened between the accents that caught the eye of Director Dave Filoni and Producer Catherine Winder. "Usually, at auditions, I stay pretty composed. If I mess up or if I'm struggling, I try not to show it. For some reason at that audition, I was so frustrated that I couldn't give the accent that they wanted, I really started to show a lot of emotion. In trying to get into the script, I moved around a lot, and moved my arms, you know, just really got into it," explains Eckstein.
When she got the part of Ahsoka, she was not called to put on any accents but rather use her real voice. "They said my real voice and my body movements and facial expressions were what they were thinking for Ahsoka. In that first session is where I found out who I was playing. I had no idea what character I was playing, what her name was, who she was. So it definitely was very surreal to sit there in the first recording session and find all of this out. I truly felt like I was in a dream."
Star Wars: The Clone Wars is now playing in theaters.
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