Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae used Liam Neeson as inspiration for his latest role
The award-winning star of Squid Game Lee Jung-jae has opened up on where his inspiration for stepping into the Star Wars universe came from.
While many audiences will have become acquainted with him from his work in Squid Game, he's currently starring in new Star Wars series The Acolyte.
In it he plays Master Sol, a wise Jedi Master with a personal connection to the goings on in the show, as his former protégé Mae (Amandla Stenberg) appears to have taken against the Order.
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As for what Sol gets up to in The Acolyte, you'll just have to tune in and see for yourself.
The first two episodes of the show have released on Disney Plus, with the remainder of the series coming one at a time on Tuesdays.
Ahead of the release of The Acolyte, Lee Jung-Jae sat down with LADbible to discuss the inspiration he drew on before donning Jedi robes and striding into Star Wars.
The 51-year-old actor told LADbible: "In preparation for my role as Master Sol, I went back and looked at all the characters and all the actors that I'd played as Jedi Masters in the past and I really tried to create this connective tissue between them and Master Sol.
"This aspect was very important to me because I wanted to show my respect and homage to all the Jedi Masters in the past and the history of Star Wars.
"Specifically I look to character the character of Qui-Gon Jinn as kind of connective line between him and Master Sol, so I definitely looked at a lot of performances in the Star Wars universe."
It's no surprise that the Squid Game star looked towards Liam Neeson's turn in The Phantom Menace for some inspiration.
For those of us who grew up on the original trilogy and had only seen the Jedi in exile at that point, it was very much on the shoulders of Neeson and Ewan McGregor to show us what a Jedi Master and his Padawan ought to look like.
Meanwhile, Lee Jung-jae in The Acolyte is very much tasked with showing us what a Jedi Master looks like in the years before, during the last days of the High Republic period.
He told us he was 'very happy but also a little bit fearful of whether I'd be able to pull off the role' when he knew he was definitely going to join Star Wars, and his mind soon turned towards thoughts of 'where am I going to begin preparing for the role'.
Of course he found this in the other portrayals of Jedi Masters throughout the series, and Liam Neeson's Qui-Gon Jinn in particular.
Training himself to behave like a Jedi Master took some work as well, as he knew he'd need to bring the presence of one to the TV screen.
"From the way that I turned my head when someone talked to me, or the way my hand moved to the steps that I took, it was a very systematic process of removing old acting habits that I had and creating new gestures for the character," he told LADbible of how he accomplished this.
While Gi-hun of Squid Game was often panicked, fearful and unsure of what came next, what we've seen of Master Sol (LADbible was shown the first four episodes of The Acolyte) shows him to be a confident and steady presence.
Of course that could all be subject to change in the episodes to come, and The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland has said that picking at some of the flaws in the Jedi Order was a difficult but necessary part of making the show.
She said: "The Jedi in most Star Wars media are so monolithically good.
"Every institution - no matter how big and how noble and how good - has individuals in it. And all individuals are fallible and flawed.
"So, the most difficult part of the show was letting go of my deep admiration for the Jedi and trying to treat them the way that beings might behave in the situations I've put them in... finding the weakness of the Jedi and kind of interrogating them was something that was difficult for me."
The Acolyte is available to stream on Disney Plus.
Topics: Celebrity, Disney Plus, Lee Jung-jae, Star Wars, TV and Film, Squid Game
Joe Harker