Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith originally ended with Natalie Portman's Padme creating the Rebellion

Any Star Wars fan is likely to offer up a long list of points if someone ever asked them where George Lucas went wrong with his prequel trilogy. Some points seem to irk lovers of the franchise more than others though... Like the fact that while it made way for a pretty awesome origins story for big bad Darth Vader (and boasted its fair share of epic lightsaber duels), the character development of its main female character left a lot to be desired.

Back in 1999's Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Natalie Portman's character, Padme Amidala, was introduced as a 14-year-old queen, who was a powerful advocate for peace and diplomacy across the galaxy. She even went on to become a politician and leading member of the Galactic Senate, an organisation which helped maintain order across many worlds. Heck, she's Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa's mother, for crying out loud. Case in point? She's a pretty big deal. Or she should have been...

Across the two films that followed, however, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, respectively, she became not much more than a lovesick woman. Ultimately, she died from a broken heart during childbirth when her other half, former Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), turned to the Dark Side. But she wasn't always going to go out that way, according to artist Iain McGrag...

In a video that Digital Spy recently unearthed, McCaig details how Padme was actually creating the Rebellion to overthrow Anakin behind his back in an earlier script for Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, "because she could see that he was becoming a monster".

"It's Apocalypse Now, right," he continued. "At the end, Mustafar, when she goes to see [Anakin], she has a knife in her hands... She gets off that ship with the knife, she runs up and throws her arms around him, and he lets her. She's got the knife at his neck and she's going to kill him. He lets her, and she can't do it. She loves him too much to stop him, even when he's becomes the monster. Enter Obi-Wan, Anakin freaks out, kills Padme. Well, almost. Wouldn't that have been good?"

While Padme would have still met the same fate, this original sequence sounds like it would have been much more in-keeping with the strong woman that fans know Padme can be. Even if she didn't kill Anakin in the end, it would have been evidence that she at least tried to see past her consuming feelings for him in favour of saving the galaxy from dictatorship and actively attempted to stop him, going out in somewhat of a blaze of glory. Instead, she just "lost the will to live", or so a medical droid says.

Oh, what could have been! For those unfamiliar with the films, Anakin and Padme's actual confrontation went down a lot differently in the 2005 instalment. Check it out for yourselves below...