Solo: A Star Wars Story Writer Thinks Thandie Newton Was Too Good For Her Role

The team behind each new Star Wars movie benefits from an almost unbelievably large budget, and while these high financial stakes certainly come with their drawbacks – see the insufficient box office returns for Solo: A Star Wars Story – this generous funding allows for some pretty big names to be employed, even for a few supporting roles.

That being said, with so much acting talent crammed into a single picture, it’s inevitable that some cast members will come across as a little underused or outright misused. For the recent Han Solo spinoff, for instance, writer Jon Kasdan has expressed some regret at killing off Thandie Newton’s character Val so early on, partly because she did such a good job of making audiences sad to see her go.

“In retrospect, Thandie Newton may have actually been too good and too interesting as Val. It was always in the design of the story that Beckett would lose his trusted crew members during the Conveyex Job-gone-wrong and be forced to rely on newbies, Han and Chewie, and this would also open the door for Lando, Qi’ra and L3 to join the crew, but Thandie is so compelling to watch that the death of her character feels a little like a cheat. It’s an odd and unexpected problem that comes with working with such amazing, compelling actors in the Star Wars universe. You just want more of them.”

There are certainly worse problems to have in a movie than your actors being too good, but Kasdan may well have a point. Though the Solo script might have defined Val as just another crew member whose main purpose is to die in Tobias Beckett’s heist, the casting of Newton drew a lot more attention to the character, perhaps making her early demise seem somewhat emotionally manipulative.

Regardless of where you stand on Newton’s role and her tragic fate, it doesn’t look like the surviving cast of Solo: A Star Wars Story will be featuring in a sequel anytime soon, but if you’re keen to see how the franchise’s main saga continues, look out for Star Wars: Episode IX, which hits theaters on December 20th, 2019.