Lucasfilm‘s “Solo: A Story Wars Story” was a costly venture for the studio, as they fired the original directors, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, leading to very expensive reshoots led by acclaimed director, Ron Howard. And as we all know, those reshoots were quite extensive, greatly changing quite a bit of the story along the way, apparently including the fate of at least one of the main characters.
“Solo” actress Thandiwe Newton (“Westworld“) is doing press to promote her latest film, “Reminiscence,” and revealed to Inverse that her “Star Wars” character, Val, wasn’t originally supposed to die on camera. Lamenting that Val’s original fate, in the script, was meant to be left as a mystery with her being shot into space and allow her to potentially return in the future.
“I felt disappointed by ‘Star Wars’ that my character was killed,” explained Newton. “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.”
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Instead, due to the reshoots and costs of the scene in the script, the film included a scene where she was killed in an explosion during the Imperial train heist. Newton also believes it was a bad look for Lucasfilm to kill off their first major Black female “Star Wars” character.
“That’s what it originally was: that the explosion and she falls out and you don’t know where she’s gone,” she said. “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 fucking joking?”
Despite all of the reshoots and money thrown at the spinoff, the film was ultimately a box office bomb, and even though there are calls for a sequel from fans, the only thing that is officially happening is that a “Lando” series is in the works from Justin Simien (“Haunted Mansion,” “Dear White People“).
So, this is yet another odd chapter in the behind-the-scenes saga that surrounds “Solo.”