Thandiwe Newton says Solo: A Star Wars Story failed the franchise's first major Black female character, Val.
"I felt disappointed by Star Wars that my character was killed. And, actually, in the script, she wasn’t killed," Newton told Inverse. "It happened during filming. And it was much more just to do with the time we had to do the scenes. 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."
"That’s what it originally was: that the explosion and she falls out and you don’t know where she’s gone," she continued. "So I could have come back at some point. But when we came to filming, as far as I was concerned and was aware, 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. But I remembered at the time thinking, 'This is a big, big mistake' — not because of me, not because I wanted to come back. You don’t kill off the first Black woman to ever have a real role in a Star Wars movie. Like, are you fucking joking?"
Val was introduced in Solo as a member of Tobias Beckett's team, along with Rio Durant, and it's established that she was named after the valachord instrument her father used to play. During a mission to steal Coaxium from a conveyex, Val is killed after she was forced to set off a bomb that was intended to derail the vehicle.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is widely considered to be one of the biggest flops in the history of the franchise. Despite a vocal fanbase, the film -- which was released just six months after the divisive The Last Jedi -- grossed just $392.92 million worldwide on a $275 million budget. "The studio blew it, but that's not unusual," veteran Star Wars screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan said in 2019.
Coincidentally, Solo is currently finding some new life thanks to Marvel's War of the Bounty Hunters event, which brought Qi'ra back into the fold. However, her allegiances are clear no longer with the carbonite-bound smuggle she once loved.
Source: Inverse
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