When Star Wars: The Last Jedi hit theaters, the movie split audience opinion in half quicker than Darth Maul was bisected in The Phantom Menace. J.J. Abrams had played it incredibly safe with The Force Awakens by using nostalgia to power his relaunch of the beloved franchise, but Rian Johnson was vilified for making some major changes to the established mythology.
Of course, the filmmaker eventually found himself being widely thanked for his contributions to the series once The Rise of Skywalker became the subject of the fanbase’s ire, but one of the more unpleasant points of contention was the backlash directed towards Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico. The young actress must have thought her career had been changed forever by securing a prominent role in The Last Jedi, but she was ultimately forced off social media entirely after being the target of a torrent of online abuse.
Inevitably, many Star Wars fans were then furious at Lucasfilm for drastically reducing her screentime in The Rise of Skywalker just two years after Rose Tico had been labeled the worst thing to happen to Star Wars since Jar Jar Binks, but the 31 year-old has taken it all in her stride.
Filmmaker Jon M. Chu recently volunteered to develop a Rose Tico spinoff series for Disney Plus, and while that doesn’t seem likely to happen, Tran has now admitted that she’d definitely be on board with the idea.
“He’s so cool. I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. It’s so strange. I had so much fun being in that world but I feel like the pieces would have to fall into a perfect little puzzle, and everything would have to feel like it’s the right time and the right moment and the right story, like with any other project. But I don’t know. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think there are a lot of characters in that universe that we have yet to hear enough about.”
There are currently up to nine Star Wars shows in the works for Disney Plus, and virtually every character from the franchise’s long and illustrious history has been linked to an appearance at some point, but based on the way she was treated by a vocal minority of fans, Tran is probably much better off leaving that galaxy far, far away behind her.
