At last linking the separate, yet equally sprawling sagas of Star Wars and Tupac Shakur apocrypha, the New York Daily News passes along the report that, shortly before his death, the slain rapper auditioned for the role of Mace Windu in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace. Death Row engineer Rick Clifford made the surprising, as-yet-unconfirmed claim in an interview with the fan site 2Pac-Forum.com, prefacing it by saying he and Shakur had often discussed the rapper’s burgeoning film career—which already included roles in movies like Juice and Poetic Justice—after Shakur learned Clifford “worked for [90210’s] Brian Austin Green,” on Green’s sole hip-hop album, One Stop Carnival. And, if you accept the assertion that discovering Clifford had worked on a rap record with Brian Austin Green would inspire Tupac to identify Clifford as someone with whom he could discuss the cinema, you might then accept Clifford’s explanation of how Tupac almost found himself on the West Side of Yoda.