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Galactic News
Saturday June 15,
2002
Homing Beacon
#62
The latest Homing Beacon has arrived, and today we get to talk about the evil Count Dooku! Joining the pantheon of such dark side villains as Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Darth Vader and the Emperor is Christopher Lee's Count Dooku, or Darth Tyranus. The conceptual exploration of a new Sith villain for Episode II meandered through many iterations -- including gothic vampiric female warriors and half-cyborg samurai. The end result, though, of a rogue Jedi of stately menace could only have been accomplished by an actor of Lee's presence and history.
"He's fascinating," says Writer/Director George Lucas. "Christopher plays it so you don't quite know if Dooku's disenchantment with the corruption in the Republic is valid -- because it is valid. It's all valid. He plays it like: is he really a villain or is he really just somebody who's gotten disenchanted and trying to make things right? He was Qui-Gon's master, and his feeling of loss at Qui-Gon and thinking about him is real. He's not just a monster that, say, Darth Maul was."
In addition to the screen presence Lee brings to the charismatic separatist character, he also brings with him decades of martial skills. "He's a really brilliant swordsman," says Lucas. "He's done more sword-fights than any other actor. He was doing sword-fights back when the films that we're trying to mimic were the real films!"
"This is a different kind of sword-fighting, so he had to learn a new kind, and he's very good at that. And we had a really good stunt double that is a world-class swordsman. Through digital technology, we were able to take Christopher's likeness and put it on the stuntman, so the stuntman looks exactly like him. We combined the close-ups of Christopher and the stuntman, which is what you normally do in a movie, but now we were able to do it more precisely, so it's more seamless."