The 50 Best Star Wars Characters

Has a cultural phenomenon ever inspired such devotion, such passion, such – for want of a better term – extreme nerdiness than the ‘Star Wars’ saga? From the films to the figures, the tie-in novels to the TIE-fighter coffee mugs, the blogs to the chatrooms to the international fan conventions, it’s the closest thing cinema has to a unifying faith. Exactly why this should be is unclear, even to those of us who worship at the shrine of Skywalker – but we reckon a lot of it has to do with the characters.

They can be intensely heroic or irretrievably evil. They can be alluringly human or repulsively alien. Remote and robotic or cuddly and cute. But the characters in ‘Star Wars’ are endlessly fascinating. So here, in an entirely personal and inevitably controversial list, Time Out’s resident Gonk-geek Tom Huddleston presents the 50 best ‘Star Wars’ characters, in order of greatness.