Thandiwe Newton shares the full story behind her Solo: A Star Wars Story character's death and expresses disappointment for how it went down. Following the success of 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Disney planned on continuing its expansion of the galaxy far, far away with additional standalone features. The second was an origin story for fan favorite smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich), an effort that received some mixed responses. While Solo scored generally positive reviews, it only earned $393.2 million worldwide, a low for the entire Star Wars franchise.
Newton nabbed the role of Val, a galactic criminal working alongside her husband Beckett (Woody Harrelson). Fresh off her critically acclaimed performance on HBO's Westworld, Newton's casting in Solo was met with much excitement. However, Val ends up dying early on in Solo when a job goes wrong and she sacrifices herself so Beckett and Han can get away. The scene came as a shock to many, including Newton herself. As she revealed in a recent interview, Val's original fate was much more vague.
Newton sat down with Inverse to promote her new movie Reminiscence, though she also touched upon other topics like Westworld and Star Wars. On the latter, Newton did not mince words when it came to how she feels about Solo's handling of Val. "I felt disappointed by Star Wars that my character was killed," she said. She then elaborated, explaining that things were initially different:
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 fucking joking?
Though the newest Star Wars era has made great strides when it comes to diversity, there's also been some criticism in how the franchise handles its characters of color. John Boyega's Finn was Star Wars' first Black lead, but after a promising start, he was largely sidelined in 2017's polarizing Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Boyega came forward with his own disappointment in how Finn's story was handled last year. The Last Jedi also introduced the franchise's first lead Asian character in Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), but she soon became the target of racist attacks online and had her role diminished in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Solo had an infamously difficult production that saw its original directors, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, replaced over halfway through filming. It could be that Val's death was one of the results of this change, with production falling behind schedule and there being no time to create the different set piece. Nevertheless, Newton has every right to feel disappointed with how Solo played out. Her casting was an important step forward for the franchise, and Val's quick death cut short a character who had a lot of potential. Hopefully future Star Wars movies can do better when it comes to its characters of color.
Source: Inverse
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