For an actor to be convincing, he needs to understand the words he’s saying, and in film, where there is often no rehearsal, an actor has to say lines he didn’t rehearse and which haven’t been explained to him. I know exactly what he meant - I’m sure you know that sci-fi lines (dialogue) are notoriously difficult to learn because they often don’t make sense. Home says that “Colin told me the trouble he had filming was that he couldn’t remember his line, so the line he ending up saying was much shorter than the original.

So why did Colin Higgins have so much trouble remembering his lines? I felt sorry for him as so many fans considered him a fake, and he was embarrassed by that, but he really, truly WAS the original Wedge.” I met him at Celebration IV and we had a long chat. It was the 30th anniversary of A New Hope and Higgins’ first appearance at any Star Wars convention. He was fired and replaced because he kept flubbing his lines.įellow actor Gerald Home (he played both Tessek and a Mon Calamari officer in Return of the Jedi) recounts in a 2013 interview that he had met Higgins for the first time at Star Wars Celebration IV in Los Angeles in 2007. “Remember me?” ~ Colin Higgins as Wedge Antilles on the right (Photo Credit: Lucasfilm)Ĭolin Higgins is not listed in the end credits of A New Hope. He was, after all, uncredited, and he had but one brief appearance and line in A New Hope, only to be replaced in the rest of the film by Denis Lawson. Unfairly or not, fans have been calling the briefing-room Wedge “Fake Wedge” since the 1990’s. His single, uncredited line was, “That’s impossible, even for a computer” – expressing disbelief that a single starfighter could destroy the Death Star. The first actor, Colin Higgins, appeared in the briefing room scene of A New Hope prior to the Battle of Yavin. To bring Wedge to life on the big screen required the contribution of three actors: Colin Higgins, Denis Lawson, and voice actor David Ankrum. He also appears in the Star Wars expanded universe as the lead character in most of the X-Wing novels. Wedge Antilles’ claim to fame is that among all X-wing pilots, only he and Luke Skywalker survived their attacks on both Death Stars at the Battles of Yavin and Endor. As a secondary character, his origins are an enigma – as is the mystery of the real-life actors who portray Wedge on the big screen. The everyman hero, Wedge Antilles, has become something of a cult personality. Forty years later, however, the backstory of one of the characters is still being developed – or, should we say, re-developed. Janu– This year marks the 40th anniversary of A New Hope.

Black series wedge