PT Brian Blessed Talks Playing Boss Nass. Says He Warned Lucas About Jar Jar

On the latest episode of These Are The Actors You're Looking For, Jamie Stangroom interviews Brian Blessed who played Boss Nass. He discusses getting the role, his warning to George Lucas about Jar Jar, a meeting with Sebastian Shaw (Who played the unmasked Vader in Return of the Jedi not the X-Men Villain) and what his old friend Alec Guiness really thought about being in Star Wars. Also you get to hear him do the Braveheart speech as Boss Nass just for the hell of it.

 

Cool interview.

Not the warning your thread title would suggest, he was talking more about Jar Jar not making his trademark sounds in place of plot dialogue, because the audience won't know what is going on.

I tend not to believe him about Alec Guinness loving Star Wars though

 

Well most articles I found tended to include that in the title. My guess to draw more people to it.

 

This guy's frigging crazy. I love it

 

Aside from the misleading title, awesome video. Brian Blessed is awesome, Boss Nass is awesome.

Seriously, though, I'm not just saying that. Boss Nass has always been one of the absolute highlights of TPM for me. He steals every scene he's in. And that face-shaking tic is pure genius.

 

A truly "larger than life" character -- Nass/Blessed.

Love hearing him speak. And did you know, back at the time of TPM, Brian Blessed equated Lucas with Shakespeare?

However, he's a little wide of the mark when he talks about Jar Jar's speech patterns, and the example he gives is a poor one.

Jar Jar is very clear and discernible when he tells Qui-Gon, "The Gungan city is deserted. Some kind of fight, mesa tinks", and when he tells Qui-Gon (the precise line Blessed is talking about) where he thinks his people might be: "When in trouble, Gungans go to sacred place. Mesa show you. Come on. Mesa show you!"

I think Blessed might be mistaking Jar Jar's excited tone at the end of that line (the "mesa show you, mesa show you" part), for some kind of garbling of the preceding remark, but that's not the case in the film itself. Jar Jar is more restrained on that part so the idea can be communicated that the Gungans are in retreat, and, unlike the Trade Federation, respect both the water and the land (if not the Naboo civilization itself) for being sacred (rather than a set of resources to be trampled down, enslaved, and exploited). In fact, having just put the DVD on, I can say that Jar Jar speaks with remarkable -- almost exaggerated -- clarity on the "sacred place" line, and he says it in close-up, allowing the line reading to make a strong impact. Following that, we have Jar Jar's emphatic "mesa show you", as well him gesturing clearly with his arms as takes the lead and begins walking to show everyone the way.

Moreover, Blessed (I keep wanting to call him "Nass") doesn't seem to quite grasp the deliberate distinction between his character, the other Gungans, and Jar Jar. They are technically two different species cohered as one civilization/race. And Jar Jar, in contrast with the other Gungans, is given to baby-talk and prattle (though these aspects are hardly absent in the other Gungans: e.g., Captain Tarpals), not to mention what the Gungans, or the Gungan High Council, deemed "clumsy" conduct (in a film that could be called a "comedy of errors" narrative and is full of crafty mirrors and "others" and humour that ranges from sly rebukes to pratfalls and "poop" jokes -----> all part of the charm and "comedy of errors" allegorical thrust). Jar Jar's vague incomprehensibility, on a first/formative viewing, is part of the point; and part of the allure of the film, in my opinion, generally. Yet, at the same time, I think Blessed is slightly inflating the problem, as he sees it, and trying to identify a cause many years after the fact.

Not trying to roast Brian Blessed, though. It's a fairly innocuous piece of self-promotion intertwined with, I think, a gallant, well-meaning defence/explanation of the "Anti-Jar Jar" phenomenon; just a bit of a wobbly one, in the form of some "actor-quarterbacking", in my opinion.

 

Could perhaps he means when they were talking on set before the audio edits? Because here in the movie J dawg is speaking very clearly.

 

This interview was hilarious