With the current flavor of the week for fans to bash on is Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it’s easy to forget just how ridiculed the prequel trilogy was. Jake Lloyd, who played Anakin Skywalker, was very publicly harassed for his part in the trilogy, but if we’re talking about a specific character who takes the cake as the most disliked, it’s likely to be Jar Jar Binks.

Ahmed Best, who played Jar Jar Binks in the films, spoke with Wired last year about the difficulties of playing someone who fans loved to hate so much.

“It’s really difficult to articulate the feeling,” he told the outlet then. “You feel like a success and a failure at the exact same time. I was staring at the end of my career before it started…There were a lot of tears, there was a lot of pain, there was a lot of shit I had to deal with. Everybody else went on. Everybody else worked. Everybody else was accepted by the zeitgeist.”

But just how deep was that pain?

“I had death threats through the internet. I had people come to me and say, ‘You destroyed my childhood.’ That’s difficult for a 25-year-old to hear.”

In a recent tweet from the actor, he revealed that he, at one point, contemplated suicide thanks to the overall response to the character.

20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today. 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. Would this be a good story for my solo show? Lemme know. pic.twitter.com/NvVnImoJ7N — Ahmed BEst (@ahmedbest) July 3, 2018

At this point, us fans are no strangers to stories like this. Most recently director Rian Johnson and actress Kelly Marie Tran have been the latest talents to face ridicule from fans — oftentimes to a maddening level. It’s comforting to see that Best has been able to find happiness, even after this crappy stage in his life passed.

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SOURCE: Ahmed Best, Wired