Thandiwe Newton had some choice words to say to the creatives at Lucasfilm for prematurely killing off Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
It seems as if the woes that Solo: A Star Wars Story suffered are only growing larger as time goes by. The film was mired by production issues, with directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller being replaced by Ron Howard midway through production. This led to numerous rewrites and reshoots, and some key changes that drastically altered the direction of the film. Thandiwe Newton, who starred as Val, opened up to Inverse about how her character didn’t originally die in the film.
Speaking with the outlet, Thandiwe Newton revealed that Val didn’t die in the original script. In case you’ve forgotten, Newton’s Val made a big splash, only to be killed in the Star Wars film’s opening hour. Why? Because of cost-cutting measures.
“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.”
The actor continued by chastizing Lucasfilm for killing off the first black woman to have a lead role in a Star Wars film.
“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?”
It’s extremely disappointing that Lucasfilm didn’t follow through with the original plans they had for Thandiwe Newton’s Val. The character was genuinely interesting and acted as a rational counterpart to Woody Harrelson’s Beckett, to who Val was married to. Solo: A Star Wars Story received mostly positive reviews from critics, though the Lucasfilm production had a less than stellar showing at the box office.
Here is the official synopsis for Solo: A Star Wars Story:
Board the Millennium Falcon and journey to a galaxy far, far away in Solo: A Star Wars Story, an all-new adventure with the most beloved scoundrel in the galaxy. Through a series of daring escapades deep within a dark and dangerous criminal underworld, Han Solo meets his mighty future copilot Chewbacca and encounters the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian, in a journey that will set the course of one of the Star Wars saga;s most unlikely heroes.
Directed by Ron Howard from a script written by Lawrence Kasdan and son Jon Kasdan, the film stars Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Thandiwe Newton, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Joonas Suotamo, and Paul Bettany.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-Ray, DVD, and Digital HD. Stay tuned for all the latest news on Star Wars, and be sure to subscribe to Heroic Hollywood’s YouTube channel for more original video content!
Source: Inverse
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