text: SALT LAKE CITY — Who is the most hated Star Wars character of all time? 
   
   If you think it’s Jar Jar Binks, youssa wrong. 
   
   A new poll from Morning Consult just offered a clue as to which characters Star Wars fans favor and dislike the most. 
   
   The poll, which surveyed 2,200 people, asked respondents to pick their favorite Star Wars character. Leia led the list with a 73 percent favorability rating. 
   
   Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, Yoda and R2-D2 were close behind, all within 2 percent of Leia. 
   
   Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) escape from the Death Star in “Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope.” 
   
   Here’s where it gets interesting: Anakin Skywalker received a 55 percent rating, while Darth Vader (who is Anakin Skywalker) received a 49 percent rating. 
   
   “That appears to be the first evidence we've ever found that slaughtering Jedi children, torturing your daughter and cutting off your son's hand will only cost you a 6 percent dip in the polls,” according to Mashable. 
   
   A look at another part of the poll reveals the most hated character. None of the original trilogy characters made that list, all of them receiving at least 40 percent in favorability. 
   
   And it wasn’t Jar Jar Binks, who had a 37 percent approval rating (only one spot behind "Force Awakens" heroine Rey). As writer Chris Taylor for Mashable pointed out, according to the poll's statistics, Republican men seemed to really appreciate Jar Jar Binks. Draw your own conclusions from that. 
   
   Jar Jar Binks finished ahead of Mace Windu, Kylo Ren, Emperor Palpatine, Jyn Erso and Wedge Antilles, too. (Though we wonder if this would change if people knew Jar Jar is secretly a Sith Lord). 
   
   But it was Supreme Leader Snoke who bottomed out on the list with 26 percent. 
   
   Snoke, who first appeared in “The Force Awakens," finished lower than Count Dooku (the villain from “Attack of the Clones”) and Donald Trump, who’s favorability sits at 32 percent. 
   
   The Morning Consult poll, which asked 2,200 people about their opinions on the Star Wars movies, also broke down the results by demographics and political preferences, providing a wealth of data that can be scavenged for weeks after the upcoming "Last Jedi" film drops. 
   
   Examining how politics mix with Star Wars, statistics from the poll revealed that 53 percent of respondents don't consider Star Wars to be political, and that of the 17 percent who do, 41 percent are bothered by the series’ political tone, according to Morning Consult. 
   
   “While the poll found a small minority of respondents who find the politics of Star Wars bothersome, among a number of enthusiasts, fanatics — and well, geeks — the movies’ perceived political undercurrents have long been a source of fascination and fierce debate,” according to a press release on the poll. ||||| Even if you were the kind of Star Wars true believer who found it impossible to like Jar Jar Binks, trust me: You’d have an even harder time disliking Ahmed Best. We meet on a midsummer Sunday morning in Los Angeles. Best, now 43, is wearing a sky-blue Henley shirt, tan pants, and thick-framed black glasses. He is tall and fit, with an easy smile and a tattoo across his right arm that reads “Fighting Without Fighting”—a reference to Enter the Dragon, his second-favorite movie of all time (The Empire Strikes Back is number one). “My father was a martial arts teacher,” Best says. “And when my mom went into labor with me and my twin brother, he said, ‘Let’s go see Enter the Dragon.’ When Bruce Lee came on the screen, I was like, ‘It’s time to get out this womb, and into the world.’” 
   
   The week had been a busy one for Best. The night before, he’d helped coordinate visuals for a multimedia live show celebrating the music of the late hip-hop producer J Dilla. And a few days before that, Best had launched The Afrofuturist Podcast, a new series in which he interviews authors, creators, and technologists about where things are heading. It’s a show about the future that’s closely linked to Best’s past. “For Star Wars, I was a part of this new hybrid-performance technology that eventually ended up changing movies,” he says. “That put me in this very, very forward-thinking mindset.” 
   
   Best has been interested in technology since childhood. He spent his early years in the Bronx before his family relocated to Maplewood, New Jersey. “Growing up, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, or a computer scientist, or a physicist,” he says. “I didn’t realize you could do a bunch of stuff and be a polymath, because at that time everybody was like, ‘Figure out that one thing that you’re great at, and do that one thing.’” 
   
   As it turned out, Best was pretty great at computers: He learned BASIC programming, started working with music software, and, along with a friend, sold books via a rudimentary retail site he launched (and quickly abandoned) in the early ’90s. “People we were hanging out with were like, ‘Whatever, nerds,’” he says, laughing. “But we saw the potential of the web really early on.” 
   
   In his late teens, Best moved on to music—studying percussion, playing with the New York City-based acid-jazz collective Jazzhole, and eventually landing a role in the award-winning theatrical production Stomp. “We did an open call where about 600 people turned up to audition, and Ahmed stood out straight away,” Stomp co-creator Luke Cresswell says. “We were looking for charisma and for people with something to say. And the best thing about Ahmed was the fact he was so confident and so self-assured. He could be loud, he could be opinionated. But those are all qualities that pushed him to where he is now.” 
   
   Best puts it a bit more bluntly: “I was very arrogant in Stomp,” he says. “The show came from street performers in Brighton, and British performers have always been a little bit acerbic, in a ‘The fuck you looking at?’ kind of way. And we were New York kids, street performers. So that [attitude] was right up our alley.” 
   
   By the spring of 1996, Best had earned a lead role in the show’s San Francisco company. One night, Lucasfilm casting director Robin Gurland wound up in the audience, trying to find someone who could play a new kind of film character—one that would be rendered digitally on-screen, but drawn from an actor’s performance. The search was taking forever. “Jar Jar was one of the last roles we cast,” Gurland says. “I was looking for someone who could really sell the physical aspect of the character, but who also had the acting chops to give it a literal voice—and it’s very difficult to find that in one performer.” 
   
   Best didn’t know Gurland was watching the performance, which was probably a good thing. That night, an out-of-town Stomper was visiting the city, so Best was relegated to a supporting role, leaving him fuming. “I turned into an asshole that night,” Best says. “I thought, ‘If you think you can out-anything on me onstage, you got another fucking thing coming, and I’m going to prove it.’ And I did. Had I been a little bit older, I would’ve handled that a little bit more gracefully.” 
   
   But Best’s show-offy turn wound up winning over Gurland. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him,” she says. “There’s an unknown quality that true performers have—the ability to relate to an audience and to come across as if they’re directing their performance to you specifically.” She eventually invited him to Skywalker Ranch, where Best was squeezed into a tight-fitting motion-capture suit and asked to move about. (When Lucas himself eventually showed up, Best broke into what was once described as a “break-dance glide.”) Not long afterward, he was summoned overseas to begin his work as Jar Jar. His Star Wars saga had begun.
target: – Jar Jar Binks is one of the most hated, and almost certainly the most widely ridiculed, character in the Star Wars universe. But there was an actor behind the character, Ahmed Best, who was just 25 at the time—and he recently revealed on Twitter that the negative reaction to Jar Jar led him to a very dark place. "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today," he tweeted alongside a picture of him and his son looking out over the ocean. "This was the place I almost ended my life. It’s still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival." Last year, Best told Wired he got death threats and people told him he had destroyed their childhoods. He's now planning a one-man show for the 20th anniversary of The Phantom Menace, and wondered on his tweet if the effect of the character might be good subject matter for it.