Barry Keoghan had a hilarious note from Marvel’s The Eternals director Chloe Zhao.During an interview with GQ, the Saltburn star revealed that Zhao told him to act more like Hayden Christensen during his time as Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels.“Chloe kept referencing Hayden Christensen,” he said. “His character in Star Wars to be a bit more [specific]. She just wanted me to be a bit more still, very chin high. That was the only, really, prep I kinda done was to learn to walk a bit slower. I tried to mind-control people, and people would go, ‘What are you doing? Why are you staring at me?’”Keoghan took the role of Druig in The Eternals, who uses powers of mind-control to manipulate others, a skill he clearly learned well from the Jedi mind tricks of Star Wars. However, it’s also clear to see how that chin-up advice worked on set, with Druig coming off as one of the more aloof Eternals during the 2021 superhero flick.“You’re doing superhero movies so you’ve got to humanize them,” said Keoghan. “Don’t play the superhero – try and bring the human side of them out. Chloe just kind of let me be me and wanted me to kind of be still.”Zhao previously said that The Eternals would have a huge impact on the MCU going forward, teasing a big event with repercussions that would surely be brought up later. “I do think we will have a very big effect on the future of the MCU with what happens in this film,” she said. “Which, you know, as a fan, is really satisfying for me! I geek out.”And while the film did end with a giant dead Celestial sticking out of the Earth, it’s barely come up as more than a footnote in any other Marvel projects.IGN’s review of The Eternals gave it a rather generous 7/10 and said: “Eternals is huge. Centuries worth of stories and a whole team of vastly different heroes are condensed into a visually stunning and impeccably acted film. The relationships of these complicated characters keep things as fresh as they can, but the story gets unwieldy when it shifts to a cosmic scale. Had it kept the narrative closer to home, it would have played better as a standalone film, but it wouldn’t have felt like the grand Eternals introduction into the MCU had that been the case. Director Chloé Zhao was met with an impossible challenge that she took on with grace, skill, and her trademark jaw-dropping scenery.”Want to read more about Marvel’s Eternals? Check out how a scrapped Marvel TV show would have been ‘Eternals but good’ as well as our ranking of every Marvel Phase 4 movie and TV show.Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
