There’s no denying that Star Wars is currently one of the most successful franchises Disney has a hold of right now. From current spin-offs like The Mandalorian and The Bad Batch to future projects like The Book of Boba Fett and Rangers of the New Republic, fans have a lot to look forward to. One of those things, however, isn’t the return of a groundbreaking character for the franchise.
Thandiwe Newton, who played Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story, is still upset that the character died on screen. In a recent interview with Inverse, she talked about her frustrations that her character was killed on screen when, “in the script, she wasn’t killed.”
“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.”
She also went on to discuss her anger that the first Black woman to have a major role in the series was killed off so quickly.
“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?”
Representation in film is important, and we can only hope that Star Wars continues to add more people of color to their films as the franchise continues to grow.
