You might know that one of the biggest changes brought about by the director switchover that happened halfway through production on Solo: A Star Wars Story was that Michael K. Williams was replaced by Paul Bettany in the role of the space gangster Dryden Vos. As we reported on earlier, Williams was set to portray the character via motion capture as an alien. Due to limited post production time, though, Bettany was brought on board to play the part with only minimal prosthetic scaring applied to his face.
But what could the Williams – who couldn’t continue work on the movie because of a scheduling conflict – version of Vos have looked like? Well, these wildly different concept art designs reveal that the character went through multiple incarnations in the early stages of production, with ideas floating around including depicting him as reptilian, bird-like, Jabba-esque and many, many more.
You can see them all in the gallery below, but one that fans might be confused about is the image that apparently suggests Star Wars Rebels‘ Zeb was going to appear in Solo. Despite what it looks like, that wasn’t the case. Rather, it was just briefly considered that Vos could be the same species.
From what we understand, the design that would have reached the screen if Phil Lord and Chris Miller hadn’t been fired by Lucasfilm is the one that sees Vos as a tiger-like feline alien. And though we do see the humanoid version here, it’s interesting to note that the character’s scars don’t feature in the concept art, so they must have been added later on.
Whatever you thought of Bettany’s performance as Dryden Vos in Solo: A Star Wars Story – and he was, as usual, very solid in the role – it’s a shame that most of these designs never made it into the movie. Seeing as Star Wars films have often reused old concept art though – Solo itself borrows from original designs from A New Hope – we could well end up seeing some these creatures turn up in future installments in the saga. Fingers crossed, eh?
