How did you get you end up appearing in The Clone Wars?
Matt Lanter: It was a normal everyday audition for a job. My voiceover agent told me there was a casting call for a Star Wars animated series and they said they couldn't tell me anything about it. Being a new Star Wars production, there was a lot of secrecy, so I went in not really knowing what to expect. I was supposedly reading for a character called Deak Starkiller, which I researched to try to get some information. I couldn't find anything, so I was kind of in the dark as to what I should do.
Dave Filoni [the director] and Catherine Winder [the producer] told me to play a combination of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker, and I had a small script to read. A couple of days later I got the call to say that I got the job, and also that I was Anakin Skywalker -- one of the leads of the series. So it was quite a twist!
Ashley Eckstein: I was actually called in to audition for the role of Padmé. I showed up, but I didn't have high hopes because I'd worked really hard to sound like Natalie Portman and wasn't quite mastering her voice. I told my agent that I didn't think I was quite right for the role, but she advised me to go anyway.
As I said the first line, they cut me off and told me that I sounded too young. So it was exactly what I had thought. However, they said that they wanted me to audition for a different role. They didn't tell me who it was, but they did say it was a new character. They wanted me to toy around with some different accents and put my own spin on it. Everything I was coming up with wasn't what they wanted and I was getting really frustrated, but somehow I managed to get a call-back. I went to a dialect coach and I practiced the accent that they wanted me to come back with. But it still wasn't what they wanted! Usually I am pretty composed in auditions -- if I'm struggling or if I mess up I try not to let it show -- but for some reason I let my guard down and my frustration showed through. They saw that I was really disappointed in myself and I was trying to be perfect for them. I walked out of the call-back and told my husband that I didn't think that I had been able to give them the accent they wanted.
Somehow, though, I got the part! I still didn't know what part I was going to be playing.
I showed up to the first recording session and they told me who the character was and then said, "We don't want you to use an accent, we want you to use your own voice, because your expressions, body movements, and the inflection of your real voice is what we had pictured for the character of Ahsoka! Let's toy around with it and bring some of your natural attitude to the character and let's try to find Ahsoka." It was a collaboration; we worked on it for a couple of months, and finally found the character.
Matt, did you study Hayden Christensen's performance?
Matt: I went back and watched it again, and took note of some of the important features of the character, but for the most part we're trying to do something new with this Anakin in The Clone Wars. He's a hero and a mentor. He's this great warrior that we always heard about. In the films, Hayden did something that was very necessary to portray that spiral down to the dark side within two films. He did what he had to do in those films but now we're seeing Anakin in a different time period where we actually get to relax a little and expand on his character during that time. And during The Clone Wars, you'll see some flashes and tones of the dark side here and there, but for the most part he's a happy-go-lucky guy.
Given how far in advance you record the show, is there a lot of secrecy?
Ashley: We don't get to keep any of our scripts. We get them 24 hours before we record an episode and then we have to turn them in before we leave the studio. It really is tough because I don't remember some of the stories in terms of details -- we recorded them around three years ago! It's kind of tough if a fan asks me what my favorite line is, because I don't have the luxury of going back to the script. When they watch it on Friday nights on Cartoon Network that's the first time I'm watching it too!
Where would you like to see Anakin go as The Clone Wars progresses?
Matt: I think we all know where he eventually goes! He's like the Titanic -- we know he's a sinking ship. I don't know what the timeline is as far as how much we're going to see him travel to the dark side. We haven't talked about the span. I know we're seeing flashes of the dark side here and there, and we're going to discover a little more why he has a huge fall at some point in the series, but I don't know when.
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