Star Wars: Jake Lloyd
By Sean M. Smith

"My favorite Star Wars character was Darth Vader. He's evil. He fit my personality."

Bowling isn't Jake Lloyd's game, but that doesn't stop him from having a strategy. "I like to get a running start," he says. He turns the bill of his baseball cap to the back, grabs his child-weight, marbled peach ball, and marches away from the lane. He pivots, plants his size 4 1/2 shoes in a wide stance, and sizes up the goal. Focus. Pause. Go! He sprints for the line—the ball pulling him to the left, his will pulling him to the right—and lets it fly. The ball speeds toward its target, but Lloyd isn't watching. He's skating down the lane behind it.

Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace is about to launch Lloyd into the child-star stratosphere. For now, though, no one at this Los Angeles bowling alley notices the ten-year-old Anakin Skywalker (a.k.a. Darth Vader) as he knocks down pins, with his parents and his seven-year-old sister.

He looks like any other innocent, adorable kid. But don't expect him to conform to a preconceived paradigm of Culkin-Lipnicki cuteness. "My favorite Star Wars character was actually Darth Vader," he says, his smirk sliding into a grin. "He's evil. He just fit my personality, right there."

The arc of George Lucas's six-part epic is, at its core, Anakin's story: a journey from innocence to evil to, finally, redemption. In Episode I, Anakin is a slave boy who, like many boys, dreams of becoming a Jedi Knight. But Anakin has an advantage: a gift that enables him to use the Force—to tap into and channel the energy of the universe. When this talent is discovered, his destiny is set in motion, and, though he is freed, he must leave his family to begin his training as an apprentice Jedi. Sadly, Jedi apprentices don't get to zap the bad guys with light sabers. Not that Lloyd let that stop him.

On the Tunisian desert set, the young actor bruised quite a few crew members as he swung one of the solid-metal weapons off-camera. When the fencing instructor offered to show him some defensive moves, Lloyd wasn't interested. "I don't care about defensive moves," Lloyd told him. "If you're defensive all the time, you'll never win." Today, as he watches the ball thrown by his sister—who has a bit part as a princess in the movie—go clunking into the gutter, he says cheerfully, "And I've always won."