‘The Rise of Skywalker’ Screenwriter Reveals Reason for Kelly Marie Tran’s Reduced Role
Written by SOURCE on December 30, 2019
Fans of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker aren’t pleased with how little time Resistance member Rose Tico, who was introduced in The Last Jedi and is played by Kelly Marie Tran, received in the film.
Chris Terrio, who co-wrote the final installment of the latest Star Wars series with director J.J. Abrams, attempted to explain the reasoning as to why the character wasn’t on screen as much. The screenwriter spoke with Awards Daily for an interview released on Christmas Eve, explaining that while both he and Abrams love the actress, they weren’t able to make the scenes that involved her and General Leia Organa, played by the late Carrie Fisher, believable enough to keep in the film.
Well, first of all, J.J. and I adore Kelly Marie Tran. One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie’s footage in the way we wanted to. We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together. As the process evolved, a few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes unfortunately fell out of the film. The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose. We adore the character, and we adore Kelly – so much so that we anchored her with our favorite person in this galaxy, General Leia.
The producers included footage from Carrie Fisher’s deleted scenes from The Force Awakens for The Rise of Skywalker.
Still, people are disappointed that Tran played a minimal role in the film. They’ve even initiated the hashtag campaign #RoseTicoDeservedBetter, led by Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu. He took to Twitter to see if Disney+ would be interested in creating a series centered around the Asian-American actress’ character.
Other fans of Tran aren’t pleased with the creative decision, either:
