Thandiwe Newton is an incredible performer who I'm always thrilled to see pop up on screen (and who pretty much carried Westworld IMHO), so it was kind of baffling that her character Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story was killed off. The film itself didn't do too well, according to The Wrap, at least by the standards of the franchise, and it sounds like things on set weren't going so hot from the get-go.
In an interview with Inverse, Newton talked about her experience filming and what she was expecting to happen to Val. Apparently, her fate was supposed to be more open-ended so that she could theoretically return to the Star Wars universe in some future sequel. Instead, she gets axed.
Val is a smuggler who joins Aldren Ehrenreich’s Han on his crew and was a pretty important character—and one of the few Black actresses in the entire franchise who actually looked like a Black woman instead of a CGI alien. So, Newton was shocked by the decision to kill Val off when it wasn't even in the script.
I felt disappointed by Star Wars that my character was killed. And, actually, in the script, she wasn’t killed. It happened during filming. And it was much more just to do with the time we had to do the scenes.
It’s much easier just to have me die than it is to have me fall into a vacuum of space so I can come back sometime. That’s what it originally was: that the explosion and she falls out and you don’t know where she’s gone. So I could have come back at some point. But when we came to filming, as far as I was concerned and was aware, when it came to filming that scene, it was too huge a set-piece to create, so they just had me blow up and I’m done.
But I remembered at the time thinking, 'This is a big, big mistake'— not because of me, not because I wanted to come back. You don’t kill off the first Black woman to ever have a real role in a Star Wars movie. Like, are you f—ing joking?"
Yes, budgetary issues set back the progress Star Wars finally made by letting Newton stand in her greatness on a planet far, far away. What a mess, and maybe it's better we won't be getting a sequel to the prequel anytime soon.
The post ‘Are You F–ing Joking?’—Thandiwe Newton Was Pissed About Her Character’s ‘Star Wars’ Fate appeared first on The Mother of All Nerds.
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