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Ahmed Best, Actor Who Portrayed Jar Jar Binks in “Star Wars”, Is A BJJ Black Belt

Ahmed Best, Actor Who Portrayed Jar Jar Binks in “Star Wars”, Is A BJJ Black Belt

Did you know that Ahmed Best, the actor who portrayed the (in)famous Jar Jar Binks character in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, is a BJJ black belt?

Best has been training for a long time and has a ton of experience in the martial art.
Here’s one of the reasons why he enjoys Jiu-Jitsu so much, as he explained on the Karbis Sarafyan YouTube channel:

I always felt like Jiu-Jitsu was incredibly honest. It’s one of the very few creative spaces that you put your money where your mouth is.

A lot of people talk a lot of game, especially in Hollywood or in other martial arts, where it’s kind of dangerous to go “full out”. But in Jiu-Jitsu, you can go full out and be the thing you say you are.

It really is a great equalizer. It’s one of the few martial arts that has that at its disposal.

Ahmed Best also spoke about the experience of earning his black belt in Jiu-Jitsu… Where it doesn’t matter who you tap, but how many times you have tapped out:

Being a black belt has very little to do with how many people you tap. I think that it has a lot more to do with how many times you’ve tapped. And I think that’s where you get your black belt from, it’s from that experience.

As a purple belt, I was tapping black belts. [But] I didn’t get the black belt the next day. It was the time that I had to spend on the mat, learning…
And I’m glad for that time, I’m glad for that purple belt journey.

I’m glad that I had a teacher that goes: “Look, I don’t care. You still have a lot to learn.”

For him, it’s about the time investment:

In this martial art, the black belt is about the time that you’ve spent, and that’s a great equalizer.