As Adam and Eve discovered way back in the day, a little knowledge can be a terrible thing. This is what Star Wars: Episode IX star Domnhall Gleeson is now discovering after he made the fateful decision to read the entire script for next December’s finale to Disney’s Sequel Trilogy.
Yup, General Hux knows precisely what’s going to happen between Kylo Ren and Rey, the final fate of Leia and her beleaguered Resistance and what role any Skywalkers might play in the film dubbed the final entry in the Skywalker Saga. The actor revealed his mistake when speaking to the Happy Sad Confused podcast, saying:
“I made the terrible mistake of reading the script, I know everything. The nightmare is falling asleep on public transport… The nightmare is you wake up on a plane and someone’s dictating. You wake up and your mouth is shaping words, you wake up and you’re like ‘Skywalker did this.’ And then you realize you don’t know how long you’ve been speaking, and there’s a kid filming, there’s somebody writing it down. And because you’re in the air, you say ‘We need to have a talk before we land, I can access my bank account.'”
I’m actually a little surprised that Disney and Lucasfilm are being so cavalier with the shooting script. Avengers: Infinity War was notoriously cagey during production about allowing the cast to see the bigger picture, going so far as to distribute ‘fake’ scripts to the actors so as to minimize how much any one person knew about the film. It seems they haven’t taken a similar tack with Episode IX, so expect pretty much every word out of Gleeson’s mouth up until the December 2019 release to be scrutinized very closely.
It seems that his worst nightmare would be dropping the kind of clanger that Mark Ruffalo did in that famous interview alongside Don Cheadle. Perhaps having had a glass of wine too many at the comp bar, Ruffalo outright spoiled the famous Thanos snap by saying “everyone dies.” Fortunately, it seemed so outlandish that no one paid much attention to it, but it has to be every actor’s worst nightmare to reveal a spoiler that’s going to make the studio absolutely furious and piss off the fans.
Then again, if I was in Gleeson’s shoes and I had had the opportunity to read the Star Wars:Â Episode IX script, you’d be damn right I’d take it. How about you, though? Could you resist the forbidden fruit?
