Kelly Marie Tran’s Role In “Star Wars” Was Cut Down Because Editing Footage Of Carrie Fisher Was Too Difficult
Kelly Marie Tran hasn’t exactly had the easiest transition into the galaxy far, far away. The first time she appeared in a Star Wars film, racist haters chased her off social media. Her most recent appearance in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was limited to a brief 76 seconds. Well, Rise of Skywalker screenwriter Chris Terrio recently spoke about Kelly’s demotion and he says it’s nothing Kelly did. According to Chris, it’s all because of the late Carrie Fisher.
Chris spoke to Awards Daily about the latest Star Wars project that will eventually earn $1 billion and help Disney to maintain its all-powerful choke-hold on the movie industry. The question on a whole lot of fans’ minds is why Kelly’s character Rose Tico, a fairly significant character in 2017’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, has suddenly been reduced to what is basically a featured extra. It’s been said that it didn’t really seem like J.J. Abrams, director of SW:TRoS, was too interested in using the material left for him by Rian Johnson, director of SW:TLJ. But Chris swears this isn’t the case.
Rose Tico is a mechanic with the Resistance who makes friends with John Boyega’s Finn, and it’s kind of implied they might get together at the end of SW:TLJ. But J.J. Abrams decided to keep Rose back with Princess Leia Organa, of course played by Carrie Fisher. Carrie wrapped filming on SW:TLJ in 2016, right before she passed away. So all of her scenes in SW:TRoS had to be cobbled together from leftover footage, and there was only so much to work with, and it was difficult to balance Carrie’s wit with some of the more serious scenes.
“There are scenes of Carrie from Episode VII that we wish we could have used because they were fantastic, but if it seemed like we were artificially shoe-horning them into the story, then we didn’t use them because we felt the responsibility of staying true to Carrie’s performance as Leia…We knew there was, in this movie, a certain sobriety about Leia, and we had to pick and choose to ensure the weight of responsibility was still on Leia’s mind while at the same time maintaining a sense of Carrie’s wit and brilliance.”
Chris says that it was impossible to give Kelly more screen time, because her character is linked pretty closely with Princess Leia. And they only had so much Leia to work with.
“Well, first of all, J.J. and I adore Kelly Marie Tran. One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie’s footage in the way we wanted to. We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together.
As the process evolved, a few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes unfortunately fell out of the film. The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose. We adore the character, and we adore Kelly – so much so that we anchored her with our favorite person in this galaxy, General Leia.”
See Kelly? You should be flattered that you’re on screen for less time than the average Star Wars teaser trailer. Hold your head high and know that your several-second scenes were designated specifically for intergalactic icons only. And if it still feels like you got the shaft, take comfort in knowing that somewhere beyond the grave, Carrie Fisher is rolling her eyes at that excuse. Because come on! It’s 2019. Don’t tell me they couldn’t grab some audio from The Burbs, Soapdish – anything really – and make it so it sounds like Leia is telling Rose, “Bye Rose, see you when you get back!” If they can make a Baby Yoda, they can do anything.
Pic: Disney