Daily Inspiration Quote by Ian McDiarmid

McDiarmid is doing the very modern kind of acting work that happens off-camera: narrating the shifting reality of a franchise that won’t sit still. On the surface, he’s offering behind-the-scenes trivia about a deleted figure and a reworked voice track. Underneath, he’s quietly describing the power hierarchy of Star Wars, where performances are provisional and authorship ultimately belongs to George Lucas and the edit suite.

The phrasing matters. “That person” is conspicuously vague, as if naming the excised actor or character would give the deletion too much weight. It’s an actor’s diplomatic language in the face of a director-producer with godlike control over canon. Then the casual flex of “If you got the DVD” plants the moment in a specific media era: peak bonus-features culture, when fans were trained to treat behind-the-scenes footage as both evidence and communion. The DVD becomes a kind of receipt, proof that what you saw in theaters wasn’t the only version that existed.

“Ideally fixed in post” is the unspoken rule here. McDiarmid’s mention that the scene was shot “when we arrived in Australia” during Episode III’s production nods to how industrial and mobile these mega-productions are: scenes captured as components, later assembled into something that may rewrite itself with each re-release. The subtext isn’t bitterness; it’s seasoned realism. In Star Wars, even the Emperor can be overwritten.