Brian Blessed speaks – well, booms – to Empire about the formidable Gungan leader.

“It took your bloody head off!” bellows Brian Blessed down the phone line, as only he can. The legendarily bushy-bearded 87-year-old actor is recounting for Empire the first time he saw Star Wars: in 1977, having been made aware of the film from a “great big billboard at Snow Hill railway station in Birmingham”, Blessed sallied forth to the first cinema he could find. An avowed science-fiction nerd and keen space enthusiast — “I am actually a fully trained astronaut”, he notes several times during our conversation — he found himself transfixed. “Here was something totally, completely original. It was by far the finest science-fiction film I’d ever seen.”

Blessed hoped to be cast in the original trilogy, but suspects his iconic role in the similarly space- operatic Flash Gordon in 1980 may have gotten in the way. It wasn’t until the late ’90s,...