SALT LAKE CITY — Who is the most hated Star Wars character of all time? 
 
 If you think it’s Jar Jar Binks, youssa wrong. 
 
 A new poll from Morning Consult just offered a clue as to which characters Star Wars fans favor and dislike the most. 
 
 The poll, which surveyed 2,200 people, asked respondents to pick their favorite Star Wars character. Leia led the list with a 73 percent favorability rating. 
 
 Luke Skywalker, Chewbacca, Yoda and R2-D2 were close behind, all within 2 percent of Leia. 
 
 Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) escape from the Death Star in “Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope.” 
 
 Here’s where it gets interesting: Anakin Skywalker received a 55 percent rating, while Darth Vader (who is Anakin Skywalker) received a 49 percent rating. 
 
 “That appears to be the first evidence we've ever found that slaughtering Jedi children, torturing your daughter and cutting off your son's hand will only cost you a 6 percent dip in the polls,” according to Mashable. 
 
 A look at another part of the poll reveals the most hated character. None of the original trilogy characters made that list, all of them receiving at least 40 percent in favorability. 
 
 And it wasn’t Jar Jar Binks, who had a 37 percent approval rating (only one spot behind "Force Awakens" heroine Rey). As writer Chris Taylor for Mashable pointed out, according to the poll's statistics, Republican men seemed to really appreciate Jar Jar Binks. Draw your own conclusions from that. 
 
 Jar Jar Binks finished ahead of Mace Windu, Kylo Ren, Emperor Palpatine, Jyn Erso and Wedge Antilles, too. (Though we wonder if this would change if people knew Jar Jar is secretly a Sith Lord). 
 
 But it was Supreme Leader Snoke who bottomed out on the list with 26 percent. 
 
 Snoke, who first appeared in “The Force Awakens," finished lower than Count Dooku (the villain from “Attack of the Clones”) and Donald Trump, who’s favorability sits at 32 percent. 
 
 The Morning Consult poll, which asked 2,200 people about their opinions on the Star Wars movies, also broke down the results by demographics and political preferences, providing a wealth of data that can be scavenged for weeks after the upcoming "Last Jedi" film drops. 
 
 Examining how politics mix with Star Wars, statistics from the poll revealed that 53 percent of respondents don't consider Star Wars to be political, and that of the 17 percent who do, 41 percent are bothered by the series’ political tone, according to Morning Consult. 
 
 “While the poll found a small minority of respondents who find the politics of Star Wars bothersome, among a number of enthusiasts, fanatics — and well, geeks — the movies’ perceived political undercurrents have long been a source of fascination and fierce debate,” according to a press release on the poll. ||||| 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. ||||| Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) with Stormtroopers in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” (Lucasfilm) 
 
 That giant wheezing sound you hear is a collective sigh of relief, heaved by now-legion generations of “Star Wars” fans, from toddlers to their grandparents, who can rest assured that the Force is still with the franchise they grew up on or grew old with. 
 
 After George Lucas’s original trilogy of the 1970s and 1980s, followed by a mid-career slump of prequels during which he threatened to squander the beloved universe he had created (we’re looking at you, Jar Jar Binks), the stakes are unusually high for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Lucas’s characters and inventions are now the property of Disney, which in its wisdom has enlisted J.J. Abrams to reboot the series, with the aim of preserving its core values but infusing it with enough novelty to create yet another cohort of die-hard fans. 
 
 The latest trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” was unveiled during halftime of ESPN’s Monday Night Football. The film, directed by J.J. Abrams, is the seventh in the main “Star Wars” series. (The Walt Disney Company, Lucasfilm) 
 
 It’s the kind of high-stakes quest worthy of Luke Skywalker himself, and — as he did with the 2009 reboot of “Star Trek” — Abrams has proved himself worthy of the charge. “The Force Awakens” strikes all the right chords, emotional and narrative, to feel both familiar and exhilaratingly new. Filled with incident, movement and speed, dusted with light layers of tarnished “used future” grime, it captures the kinetic energy that made the first film, from 1977, such a revelation to filmgoers who marveled at Lucas’s mashup of B movies, Saturday-morning serials, Japanese historical epics and mythic heft. 
 
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 What’s more, Abrams has united the original cast with a group of newcomers who mesh seamlessly with their elders, in an ensemble effort that brims with the chops and brio of a great jam session. He’s gotten the band back together in a perfectly balanced performance of oldies and new riffs, respecting all that’s come before but never getting mired in minutiae or fatuous nostalgia. 
 
 
 
 Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) in “The Force Awakens.” (Lucasfilm) 
 
 Newcomer Daisy Ridley shines as Rey. (Film Frame/Disney/Lucasfilm via AP) 
 
 Abrams isn’t coy or gratuitously manipulative when it comes to pleasing his audience. The minute the lights go down, John Williams’s brassy anthem starts up and the opening crawl begins, explaining that Skywalker has been missing for the past 30 years, during which time an evil empire known as the First Order has taken power. A resistance movement is fighting back, led by General Leia Organa, who as the film opens has enlisted her finest fighter pilot to find Luke and enlist his Jedi powers on behalf of the rebel forces. 
 
 That’s enough synopsis for “The Force Awakens,” which deserves to be enjoyed with as clean a slate as possible, plot-wise. It even seems churlish to go into too much detail about specific characters and their roles in this world of futuristic fascism and ragtag chivalry. 
 
 Suffice it to say that Abrams has done stellar work by casting actors who will be unknown to most filmgoers but who shoulder their responsibilities with skill and confidence. Daisy Ridley resembles the plucky younger sister of Emma Watson and Keira Knightley as Rey, a scrappy, steampunk-ish scavenger who befriends a wandering soldier named Finn (John Boyega). Oscar Isaac brings just the right amount of cocksure street smarts to his role as Poe Dameron, and Adam Driver is similarly right-on as a shadowy, somewhat simian figure named Kylo Ren. 
 
 [John Boyega, ‘Force Awakens’ star, is largely unknown. That’s changing fast.] 
 
 
 
 Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford) return for more than simple cameos. (Film Frame/Lucasfilm) 
 
 It’s telling, and surpassingly cool, that the last time Isaac and Driver worked together was on a Coen brothers film, the New York folk-scene drama “Inside Llewyn Davis.” That says a lot about the taste of Abrams, who has a wonderful eye for faces and for evoking the worlds of bygone “Star Wars” films while introducing new ones. Hopping from one planet to another — one a desert, one a verdant forest, one filled with snow-capped mountains, all populated by tribal settlements that show colorful layers of wear and tear — his protagonists engage in the firefights, chases, explosions, showdowns and startling Oedipal conflicts that viewers have come to associate with Lucas’s ur-narrative. (There’s even a visit to a cantina crowded with motley extraterrestrials, an establishment owned by Maz Kanata, played by an unrecognizable Lupita Nyong’o.) Most crucially, the director and his co-writers, Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt, leaven what could be a fatally self-serious homage with teasing, thoroughly delightful flights of humor. 
 
 [Create your own Star Wars character] 
 
 
 
 Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron. (Film Frame/Lucasfilm) 
 
 Breakout “star” BB-8. (Lucasfilm) 
 
 As often as not, the funniest lines belong to Boyega, who at times resembles Kevin Hart in his slightly manic version of a reluctant warrior. Of course, the granddaddy of the form is Han Solo himself, played by Harrison Ford in an amusingly deadpan performance composed of gruff one-liners and one or two genuinely tender, even heartbreaking encounters with figures from his past. One of the most gratifying things about “The Force Awakens” is the fact that Ford and Carrie Fisher, as Leia, play much larger roles in the story than mere perfunctory cameos. 
 
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 As for Ford and Fisher’s robotic co-stars, the bad news is that they have some competition as far as adorable droids are concerned: BB-8, a roly-poly little Wall-E of a creature, rolls, beeps and blinks with such puppy-ish charisma that R2-D2 and C-3PO might want to call their agents to make sure they’re in the next installment. That’s coming in two years, which, considering the film’s somber, quietly electrifying final scene, now seems as far away as the Galactic Empire. 
 
 “The Force Awakens” has succeeded where it counts most, in creating a cast of characters that viewers can spend the next several years rooting for, especially the spirited, resourceful heroine at its center. Put another way — and hallelujah for it — there’s not a Binks in the bunch. 
 
 STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS 
 
 PG-13. Opens at area theaters on Friday. Contains sci-fi action violence. 135 minutes.
– Jar Jar Binks is one of the most hated, and almost certainly the most widely ridiculed, character in the Star Wars universe. But there was an actor behind the character, Ahmed Best, who was just 25 at the time—and he recently revealed on Twitter that the negative reaction to Jar Jar led him to a very dark place. "20 years next year I faced a media backlash that still affects my career today," he tweeted alongside a picture of him and his son looking out over the ocean. "This was the place I almost ended my life. It’s still hard to talk about. I survived and now this little guy is my gift for survival." Last year, Best told Wired he got death threats and people told him he had destroyed their childhoods. He's now planning a one-man show for the 20th anniversary of The Phantom Menace, and wondered on his tweet if the effect of the character might be good subject matter for it.