Hayden Christensen has defended an infamous scene in the Star Wars film Attack of the Clones.

During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Star Wars actor was asked whether he predicted that the now-infamous scene where his character Anakin Skywalker proclaimed his hatred of sand would follow him for the rest of his acting career.

“I had no idea,” he told host Josh Horowitz. “I always enjoyed that scene and I appreciated sort of where the sentiment was coming from.”

He added, “It was sort of a powerful metaphor for, you know, the sort of uncomfortableness of his upbringing in a lot of ways. But yeah, people really, really took to that line.”

When asked whether fans had approached him at the beach to reference the line, Christensen replied, “I’ve gotten that a couple times.”

In the scene in the 2002 film, Anakin bonded with his love interest Padmé Amidala, played by Natalie Portman, by complaining about the sandy area they inhabited.

“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating – and it gets everywhere,” he said.

Lucasfilm’s Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni revealed on the podcast that Christensen brought his character’s attitude against sand to later projects in the Star Wars franchise.

“When you came to set, when you came to do a World Between Worlds,” the director recalled, “I walked up and I think you go to me, I think I remember that you go, ‘Sand. Really?’ The whole set was just sand.”

The actor joked, “Maybe I’d offended you or something? He just covered the entire set in sand. And we gotta run through it.”

Christensen reprised his role as Anakin/Darth Vader in the recent Star Wars TV series Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka.

© Cover Media