Excellent stuff from Peter Ramsey, director of Episode 4, about how Hayden played the end reveal.
"He's a really sweet, low-key guy," Ramsey said. "He was pretty happy about being there after all this time. It had a lot of meaning for him."
As fans of The Clone Wars animated series know, Ahsoka and Anakin have a long, complicated history, going back to Ahsoka's teenage apprenticeship in that series and leading up to their painful confrontation in Rebels. But again, this is a different Anakin, one before the events of Revenge of the Sith, and Ramsey had a certain strategy of evoking a tenderness out of Christensen.
"We just talked about what it's like for him to be seeing Ahsoka after all this time, that it's a reunion for them," he said. "And I just told him, 'it's like you haven't seen your daughter in two years. She'd gone off to college and you're seeing her again and she's like a different person but still your daughter.' "
That note of direction, as Ramsey added, had a bit of extra meaning given the fact that Christensen has a young daughter of his own.
"On the Rosario side of it," he continued, "she knew what it meant in the story and it was just about selling the idea that she was waking up somewhere really having no clue as to what was going on, not understanding 'am I dead? Am I alive? Am I where I think I could be?' And the way that expression changes at the very end when she sees him and says his name is so sweet and it was just like her turning back the person she was the last time she saw him."