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.