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The United Kingdom is a small country with an oversized cultural footprint, especially when it comes to pop culture. After all, what would pop music be without the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, punk, rave, or any number of musical acts and genres that have their origins in the U.K.? Where would visual art be without British figures from John Constable and J.M.W. Turner through David Hockney and Banksy? And what would modern contemporary cinema be without Star Wars?

Yes, that’s right: Star Wars is British. I’m just declaring it right now.

Obviously, I know that the Star Wars series is funded and released by American companies: 20th Century Fox, Lucasfilm, and now the Walt Disney Company. Similarly, I also appreciate that the directors and writers of each of the big screen Star Wars movies to this point have been American — and, also, that the roots of the original trilogy come from specifically American sources as well, whether it’s the movie serials of the 1940s or the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. And yet, despite all of that, Star Wars simply feels like a British film series on some basic, important, level.

That feeling likely comes from the fact that every single Star Wars movie through 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was primarily shot in the United Kingdom, and staffed with a crew made up of British workers. You can watch any number of Making-Of documentaries and appreciate the accents as proof. (I recommend 2020’s The Skywalker Legacy for the full impact of this particular line of thinking; additionally, you’ll also get to see J.J. Abrams visibly be uncertain as to whether he wants to be making Rise of Skywalker at multiple points, for the schadenfreude fans in the audience.)

Related to that is the fact that Star Wars movies have a surplus of British actors in the background, for the uncomplicated reason that they were local, and therefore cheaper to hire for small roles. Economics created the aural texture of the Star Wars galaxy: there’s no way to watch the original trilogy of movies and not come away with an implicit understanding that middle-management of Star Wars’s Empire is explicitly English, which fits quite well with the implied ruling-class (and, for that matter, colonial call-back) elements that the Empire has baked into its core concepts.

And, of course, it’s not just middle-management: Grand Moff Tarkin, the Emperor, and Darth Vader’s physical actor were all British. The clipped tones of both Peter Cushing’s Tarkin and McDiarmid’s adopted Received Pronunciation Emperor are etched into fans’ minds, with James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader voice ultimately (if, initially unintentionally) signifying the character as an outsider to the Empire’s power structure and a character capable of redemption. After all, in Star Wars, the good guys sound like Americans*. Which, in a very unlikely, self-loathing way, is kind of very British in and of itself…? 

Claiming movies made by large groups of people across multiple continents — name one Star Wars fan who doesn’t know that Tatooine is really in Tunisia — for any specific geographical ownership is, of course, illogical and pointless and a fool’s errand.

And yet, for more than 40 years, Star Wars was made in the United Kingdom and noticeably felt like it. As the franchise looks to potentially shift location — The Mandalorian & Grogu was shot in California, although 2027’s Star Wars: Starfighter maintained a UK base — let’s recognize that no small part of a galaxy far, far away will always be quintessentially British.

(* The one exception? Obi-Wan Kenobi; Sir Alec Guinness did what he wanted, and Ewan MacGregor had to just play along.)

Get to know, understand, and love the Star Wars franchise more with our Star Wars watch order, guide to all the upcoming Star Wars movies & TV shows, and all the Star Wars movies and Star Wars TV shows ranked.