The actress claimed Val wasn’t supposed to die in the original “Solo” script.
Thandiwe Newton had some choice words as she recalled the death of her character Val in the Star Wars origin flick “Solo.”
The “Westworld” star told Inverse that she wasn’t upset she wouldn’t be able to reprise her role, but that is was more about killing off “the first Black woman to ever have a real role in a Star Wars movie” that bothered her.
“Like, are you f—— joking?” she said.
In the 2018 film, Newton’s Val ends up dying in an explosion after she sets off a bomb during a heist. While being “disappointed by Star Wars” for the decision, Newton claimed it wasn’t supposed to go down that way originally. According to the star, a tight filming schedule caused a rewrite.
“In the script, she wasn’t killed,” Newton said. “It happened during filming. And it was much more just to do with the time we had to do the scenes. When it came to filming that scene, it was too huge a set-piece to create, so they just had me blow up and I’m done.”
“It’s much easier just to have me die than it is to have me fall into a vacuum of space so I can come back sometime.”
She went on to say the prior draft had the same bomb explosion, but Val “falls out and you don’t know where she’s gone,” setting up a possible return.
“So I could have come back at some point.”
Some fans of the film were also disappointed to see Val — the partner of Han Solo’s mentor Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) — ending up with limited screen time and a brutal demise. And perhaps Newton knew it was going to be a bit of a let down for the Star Wars legion.
“I remembered at the time thinking, ‘This is a big, big mistake.'”
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