Category Articles & Interviews

It was J.J. Abrams, who two decades earlier provided her breakout role on TV’s “Felicity,” which he co-created. His email posed a simple question:

Do you want to join Star Wars?

The offer a couple of years ago, though, came with a caveat. The character she would play in “Rise of the Skywalker,” a spice smuggler named Zorii Bliss, would never remove her helmet, which covers her entire face, except occasionally her eyes.

So “I can see everyone, but no one can see me,” Russell says by phone this month.

“There’s a real power play to that,” continues Russell, describing how her nimble scoundrel of a character — who has a past with the dashing pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) — would be a distinct change of pace after her starring roles. She jumped at the chance to disappear into Zorii.

While Abrams was co-writing the character, though, he didn’t even have his old pal in mind.

“You’re really not thinking about specific actors,” Abrams says. But then, “We started to cast the picture and suddenly there was an opportunity to work with Keri again, which is something that one takes advantage of if possible.

“So she was the first person I reached out to” about Zorii, “just to say: Listen, there’s this pretty fun character,” he says.

Because Russell has training as a dancer, Abrams knew that the actress could readily play the quick, agile Zorii. And he was quite confident that Russell could deliver Zorii’s sly humor.

Yet the “Rise” director also wanted someone who could communicate with simply their voice.

“The biggest thing is the conveying of emotion,” Abrams says. Russell, the director says, is able to have “a connection to a character [that] is usually weirdly sort of deep and abstract.”

To find that connection, Russell seized on the idea that beneath this enigmatic facade, Zorii is a survivor in occupied territory. The actress also dived into the big-budget costuming, with all the precise fittings for a helmeted look that harks back to vintage space serials. Her Zorii, she realized, must be as fleet of mind as of body.

Although the role is minor, it is memorable. From a creative standpoint, Russell says, “I can’t think of anything more fun than getting to do this part.”

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/

This is an unusual admission for Abrams, having just directed and co-written the “Star Wars” film that, when it opens Dec. 20, promises to be the final installment in a nine-movie narrative about the Skywalker clan. Moviegoers have seen the curtain come down on this saga twice already: with “Return of the Jedi,” in 1983, which concluded with Luke Skywalker and his allies seemingly triumphant over the treacherous Empire; and again, in 2005, with “Revenge of the Sith,” which tracked the final steps of Luke’s father, Anakin, on his dark path to becoming the malevolent Darth Vader.

But what seemed like closed history was reopened once more in 2015, when “The Force Awakens” began a third trilogy in which the old guard of the original “Star Wars” movies fought alongside a new generation of heroes and villains. True to his boast, Abrams — who, after some trepidation, directed and helped write the screenplay for that film — inaugurated this trilogy with considerable fanfare as “The Force Awakens” went on to gross more than $2 billion worldwide. It was the last and only “Star Wars” film he intended to make.

So when Abrams was once again approached, amid a last-minute creative shake-up, about taking on “The Rise of Skywalker,” he balked. To be considered a success, the new movie must satisfy a seemingly impossible array of demands: It has to wrap up the current trilogy while tying together the many themes and plotlines of its eight predecessors while — oh, yes — working as a complete story on its own. For those same intimidating reasons, Abrams accepted the assignment. “Sticking this landing is one of the harder jobs that I could have taken,” he said. “But that was why it felt worthy of saying yes.”

Like the stories told within the films themselves, the story of this “Star Wars” film — which its creators and stars described in a series of interviews — is one in which inadvertent decisions lead to unintended consequences. It is a tale in which history repeats itself and destiny can be outrun for only so long before it must be confronted. Yet even as Abrams and his colleagues bid farewell to this part of “Star Wars” history, they are as curious as anyone to know what comes next for the series and its characters — in part because no one truly believes that their adventures are over.

I. Relaunch of the Jedi
To understand the conclusion of this new “Star Wars” trilogy, you must go back to its inception. The latest films were born from a union of creative enterprise and corporate mandate, after the Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm from its founder, George Lucas, in 2012. That’s when the monolithic studio announced its intentions to produce the seventh, eighth and ninth chapters in the space-faring fantasy series, part of what was to be an ambitious plan to release a new “Star Wars” movie every year. Even before handing the reins of his company to Kathleen Kennedy, its current president and the architect of the franchise’s future, Lucas was having conversations with the original Han Solo, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker — Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill — about resuming their roles.

At that preliminary stage, Abrams seemed like a natural candidate to help oversee a new era of “Star Wars.” He was an avowed fan of the original films, known for his stylized takes on genre TV shows (“Alias,” “Lost”) and for helping resuscitate aging properties on the big screen (“Mission: Impossible” and — ahem — “Star Trek”).

Editors’ Picks

What Happens When a Weddings Influencer Gets Divorced?

The Best Actors of 2019

We Beat Sleep Apnea. It Should Be Easier for You to Do It, Too.
Continue reading the main story

But when Kennedy formally approached Abrams, his instinct was to decline. He explained, “It was too close to something that I cared too much about. I didn’t want to leave not liking it anymore.” Or worse, he said he feared “falling flat on my face, and failing miserably.”

“My reaction was a reflexive one,” Abrams said. “I just thought it was too daunting, so I respectfully declined.”

Though Abrams had said no in a phone call, Kennedy asked him if they could talk further in person. “I knew, when the two of us sat down face-to-face, that I had him,” she said.

II. The New Hopes
One by one, the leads of the new trilogy found their way onto the project. John Boyega, who plays the renegade storm trooper Finn, wasn’t initially asked to audition but he learned about the casting call from a friend who was being considered for the role. Daisy Ridley, who portrays the heroic Rey, seemed to will her opportunity into existence. “I wasn’t approached,” she said. “I hunted it down. I didn’t even know if there was a part. I just had a feeling. So then I kept saying, ‘Are there auditions for “Star Wars” yet?’ And eventually there were.”

They were rookie actors — Boyega had starred in the cult film “Attack the Block” and Ridley had played small roles on TV shows like “Mr. Selfridge” — and both were simply excited that “Star Wars” would provide them with long-term gigs. “Before then, I was just living from project to project,” Boyega explained. “A ‘Star Wars’ film means six or seven months that I’m paying my bills.”

Once filming began on “The Force Awakens,” there was little time to revel in their fantastical surroundings. “I was mainly excited and then just terrified for a really long time,” Ridley said. “I was basically crippled with fear for a few weeks.”

Even more experienced stars like Oscar Isaac, who plays the dashing pilot Poe Dameron, found the production of “The Force Awakens” to be unexpectedly unnerving. “I hadn’t felt that self-conscious in a very long time,” Isaac said. “I remember we were about to shoot a scene and then Kathy Kennedy came up to fix my hair. It was crazy.”

Isaac added, “Everyone — particularly J.J. — was looking for, What is the tone of this movie? If we’re the symphony, what is the instrument sound that’s coming out of this character? How do we get that? It was challenging. I suddenly was uncertain.”

III. Attack of the Sequels
Amid the frantic casting, writing and construction needed to get “The Force Awakens” underway, Kennedy went to Abrams with a further proposition: In addition to Episode VII, would he like to tackle Episodes VIII and IX as well? Abrams’s response was succinct: “I was like, ‘Are. You. Crazy?’” he recalled. Kennedy acknowledged that Abrams had enough on his plate. “It was pretty obvious it was so overwhelming,” she said.

Instead, Episode VIII, titled “The Last Jedi,” was written and directed by Rian Johnson (“Knives Out”). In its story, the “Force Awakens” heroes were separated from one another, confronting personal roadblocks on individual journeys, and the actors found it just as challenging to make. “The characters were very frustrated, and it felt that way,” Isaac said. “You felt the difficult energy of those scenes, figuring that stuff out.”

“The Last Jedi,” released in 2017, was also a success. But each time it addressed one of several cliffhangers left dangling from “The Force Awakens” — what would happen when Rey returned Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber to him? who were her parents? who was the nefarious Supreme Leader Snoke? — Johnson’s movie seemed to say: the answers to these questions aren’t as important as you think.

Abrams praised “The Last Jedi” for being “full of surprises and subversion and all sorts of bold choices.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “it’s a bit of a meta approach to the story. I don’t think that people go to ‘Star Wars’ to be told, ‘This doesn’t matter.’”

Even so, Abrams said “The Last Jedi” laid the groundwork for “The Rise of Skywalker” and “a story that I think needed a pendulum swing in one direction in order to swing in the other.”

IV. The Auteur Strikes Back
Some journeys end before they begin. So it went for Colin Trevorrow, the “Jurassic World” director and co-writer, who was originally set to direct Episode IX but left the project in 2017. (He and his collaborator Derek Connolly still share story credit on the film with Abrams and Chris Terrio.) Explaining the change, Kennedy said, “We had gotten to not even a first draft when we realized it just wasn’t heading in the direction we’d been talking about.” She added that Trevorrow’s departure was “very amicable” and something that “happens quite frequently in the development phase.” (A publicist for Trevorrow said he declined to comment for this article.) Such down-to-the-wire decisions are rare but not unprecedented on tentpole studio films, and certainly not in the realm of “Star Wars,” where the “Solo” directors Philip Lord and Christopher Miller were replaced by Ron Howard after several weeks of principal photography.

With the clock already ticking on a planned 2019 release for Episode IX, Abrams was the only logical choice to take over — and even more reluctant than he was with “The Force Awakens.” On that movie, he said, “we got away by the skin of our teeth. Why the hell would I go back? Am I a moron to tempt fate a second time?” Abrams said he took the job knowing he’d be working “in an accelerated way from the beginning,” with three fewer months for postproduction than he had on “The Force Awakens.”

“I’m not saying it’s like the closest that ‘Star Wars’ will ever get to being live TV,” he said, “but it was not leisurely.”

But when it was announced that Abrams was indeed returning, his actors breathed sighs of relief. “I cried,” Ridley said, explaining that the director brought a comforting sense of structure and security. Boyega said he was glad that Abrams would get to finish the tale he’d begun in Episode VII. “Even as a normal person in the audience, I wanted to see where that story was going,” Boyega said.

Abrams, who brought in the “Argo” screenwriter Terrio as his writing partner, faced significant challenges on “The Rise of Skywalker.” Among them, the film had to provide a proper send-off for Carrie Fisher, who died in 2016. As Leia, Fisher had been an integral element of “Star Wars,” an embodiment of its hopefulness and its grit, and her story arc had not been finished by the end of “The Last Jedi.” Abrams’s solution was to draw on unused footage that Fisher had shot for “The Force Awakens.” “The idea of continuing the story without Leia was an impossibility,” he said. “There was no way we were going to do a digital Leia. There was no way we would, of course, ever recast it. But we couldn’t do it without her.”

V. The Ride of ‘Skywalker’
How you experienced the making of Episode IX depends on which tribe you belong to. For the series leads who met on “The Force Awakens” (and still haven’t fully adjusted to being called veterans), there was the simple pleasure of having an adventure that brought Rey, Poe and Finn back together, fulfilling what Ridley called “the ‘Star Wars’ mythical thing of threes.” As Boyega put it, “We’re in legit, legit ‘Star Wars’ now. We’ve got a trio up in here.”

Franchise newcomers like Keri Russell (cast as a masked mercenary named Zorii Bliss) and Naomi Ackie (who plays the warrior Jannah) felt that the new trilogy’s lead actors did all the heavy lifting for them. “I’m not going to complain,” Russell said. “It’s fun to come in on their coattails and ride this train.” With a laugh, Ackie added, “They’re all tired and weathered and worn, and we’re just like, ‘Hey, guys!’ It’s a blast.”

Then there are stalwarts like Anthony Daniels, who has played the anxious automaton C-3PO in all nine “Star Wars” saga films, and found himself bewildered by the movies’ increasing complexity. “One reason I liked the original was there weren’t that many characters,” he said. “You had the good guys, the bad guy, a few rocket ships and that was it, really. Then eventually we end up with hundreds of Jedis with different colored lightsabers and I lose track.”

The filmmakers tried to shield the actors where possible from a behind-the-scenes process in which major plot elements and whole swaths of dialogue were being reworked up to and on the days they were filmed.

As Terrio explained, “It’s a war to do a movie like this, and every day you have to get up and go to the front again. And maybe the day before, the battle didn’t go so well, but you have to get up with great optimism and enthusiasm to do it again.”

Abrams makes no apologies for this seat-of-the-pants approach. “As we did on ‘Force Awakens,’” he said, “while we’re shooting, we’re reconsidering things, changing some significant story points going back to ideas that we had loved but put away. That process never stopped.”

“Some people can say, oh, that sounds like it’s crazy,” Abrams said. “But when you have the better idea, it doesn’t matter when it is — you have to try it.”

VI. The Phantom Ending
Why does the Skywalker saga have to end at all? Abrams pointed back to Lucas’s own ever-evolving plans for the “Star Wars” series and to a certain feeling of symmetry: If each previous set of films was its own trilogy, shouldn’t they all come together in a trilogy of trilogies? “Can it go on?” Abrams said. “Of course it can go on. But there’s something bold about saying this is what the story should be.”

As he slyly acknowledged, “Any great ending is a new beginning on some level.” But what the future of “Star Wars” might look like without its foundational narrative is something Abrams — who struck a lucrative overall deal with WarnerMedia in September — was in no hurry to envision. “I didn’t design that, so I don’t know,” he said.

It’s Kennedy’s responsibility to determine what comes after the final Skywalker chapter and, as she put it, “It doesn’t have to end.” But part of living up to Lucas’s vision, she said, was looking beyond it. “We’re all custodians of something that George created, and we’re trying to do the best we possibly can,” Kennedy said, adding that it was important to “recognize and honor what it is that he created — and move on. I think we’re ready to move on.”

Who will make the next “Star Wars” film, which Disney has already scheduled for 2022? Kennedy isn’t saying, but she has been developing new projects with Rian Johnson and with Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios. (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators of TV’s “Game of Thrones,” recently walked away from their own deal at Lucasfilm to focus on projects for Netflix.)

Kennedy said she continued to discuss opportunities with other artists, and she pointed to the success of “The Mandalorian,” the live-action “Star Wars” series created by Jon Favreau for the Disney Plus streaming service, as a model for the future of the franchise. Shows like it could provide a pipeline for new stories and characters, as well as for writers and directors who could make the feature films.

“I knew that Jon Favreau was a huge ‘Star Wars’ fan,” she said. “I’d been talking to him, off and on, for a few years. He had this story, and suddenly the two of us realized, not only could this be told in the television space, but we could also push technology.”

Determining what should come next, Kennedy said, was as simple as looking at the stories that “Star Wars” has already told.

“It’s not as though we have nothing to dip into, but all it is, really, are road posts, pointing us in a direction,” she said. “You don’t spend a lot of time defining what it is that George intimates in this mythology. You tell stories about people, and you take the mythology and apply it to their conflict.”

VII. Will the Force Be With Them?
Daniels, the C-3PO actor, has been through too many “Star Wars” finales to believe that “The Rise of Skywalker” will be either his farewell or the ultimate conclusion of a story line. “You feel like you’re coming to an end, but not really closing down,” he said. “It’s a good end and our perspective on it happens here” — he held his hands up like a viewfinder, and began to pan across the room — “and then the cameras walk off over there.”

The actors with less tenure on the series are also beginning to understand what this transition means in personal terms. Their lives and careers are still largely ahead of them, and whether “Star Wars” has a lasting effect on them — positive, negative or none at all — remains to be seen. As Ridley put it, “It’s just the saga that ends. We are all still going.”

Boyega described his “Star Wars” farewell tour as bittersweet, saying, “It was sweet to play a character who grows in front of people’s eyes, and it’s bitter, leaving that consistency.” Every year he worked on the franchise, it dominated his schedule, providing a center of gravity around which everything else in his life revolved. “Now I have to go and create my own path,” he said.

Whether it takes months, years or decades, Boyega and his co-stars all believe they will one day return to their “Star Wars” roles. Pointing to Isaac, Boyega laughed and said, “This guy’s going to be in an X-Wing next week in a little spinoff series.”

Adopting an exaggerated announcer’s voice, Isaac replied, “‘Go Poe,’ on Disney Plus.” (Needless to say, Disney has not disclosed plans for any such program.)

Ridley at first seemed to dismiss the possibility of a future trilogy where she would help pass the torch to an even younger team of heroes. “I just don’t think anything could exceed this,” she said.

But Boyega was not exactly buying that. “I’ll give her a call,” he replied to her. “I’ll be like, ‘Girl, get your ass out of that damn house. Come on, Oscar said yes.’”

And who knows? Maybe Abrams might even be the one to tell that story. “I just need one night’s sleep,” he said.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/

“I would’ve played Yoda’s sister, but what I got to do was so much better,” Russell says. The role of Baby Yoda was also probably taken by then, but she promises, “My costume is slightly cooler than that.”

Russell’s not kidding: Her shady character Zorii Bliss, who makes her galactic debut in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” (in theaters Dec. 20), is an enigmatic woman who gives off lots of Boba Fett vibes with her gold aerodynamic helmet and twin blasters. She’s only been glimpsed in the trailers so far and fans don’t even know what she sounds like underneath her awesome headgear.

The former star of “The Americans” allows that Zorii is a “tough” personality, the kind of person who hangs out in places like the Thieves’ Quarter on the snowbound planet of Kijimi. “If I was in trouble, she might be someone I’d ask for help. She seems to know her way around dark corners. And when someone is more elusive, you can project what you want or need onto them.”

She also shares a past connection with one of the latest “Star Wars” trilogy’s main heroes, Resistance pilot/leader Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac). Zorii is “a real window” into an “unresolved past that was left behind” and the fact that he wasn’t always a “squeaky-clean military flyboy,” Isaac says. The dynamic between them has “a little bit of a throwback ‘His Girl Friday’ kind of vibe.”

Isaac acknowledges there’s “a lot of mystery” acting opposite somebody in a helmet, and Russell reveals that she refused to remove it for the first two days of filming.

Between scenes, “J.J. kept just trying to hang out and talk to me and he’s like, ‘Seriously, are you not going to take that off?’ ” Russell recalls. “And I’m like, ‘No, I love it.’ He’s like, ‘But I can’t see your eyes and it’s freaking me out.’ And I was like, ‘Deal with it. It’s my power right now.’

“It’s such a power move that you get to see everyone and no one can see you. It’s kind of amazing.”

At the very least, people can’t give her a hard time about her hairdo, a la TV’s “Felicity” (1998 to 2002) – her first collaboration with Abrams. “Thank goodness!” Russell says. “There may be hair underneath. Who knows?”

Overall, the outfit was “empowering,” she says, though the helmet “wasn’t light. But I was so in it. When you step on a ‘Star Wars’ set, you’re not imagining something. The world is there. They created it. Some crazy snowy planet with hundreds of Stormtroopers and creatures, there’s so much art involved. That’s why I wanted to wear the helmet, because I wanted to show up and do my part.”

Russell considers an appearance in the finale of the 42-year-old Skywalker saga “this uncanny stroke of luck that I get to just swoop in and, like icing on the cake, indulge in the last little moments of it.” Rewatching some of the older films to prepare for “Rise of Skywalker” reminded her of how much she loved Han Solo’s sense of humor as well as “the whole Joseph Campbell true-hero journey of it and how we’re all struggling with the light and dark side of ourselves. I really buy into all of that. And I think people like a life metaphor to look at and to read into what they want.”

Abrams was the perfect filmmaker to end it all because “he’s a true fan of these movies. He only wants to respect and enjoy them, instead of twisting it and turning it to be something different that’s only his.”

Russell says she feels “the weight” of this finale through him and was emotional reading Abrams’ ending: “I don’t want to say too many things. I cried. It’s a theme that I really respond to and I thought he did a great job.”

Source: https://eu.usatoday.com

Keri Russell may be new to the Star Wars universe, but that didn’t stop her from getting emotionally invested when she read the script for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.

Russell, who plays the mysterious new character Zorri Bliss in the upcoming film, recently told the Associated Press that she cried when she first read director-writer J.J. Abrams’ version of the script.

“When I read his script that he wrote I cried,” she told the outlet in a recent interview. “I mean who knows what it will turn out to be and I hope it remains true to what he originally wanted.”

She also discussed why Abrams was the right person to direct the film, which is the ninth and last entry in the Skywalker saga. He previously directed 2015’s The Force Awakens, but Rian Johnson stepped in to direct its 2017 follow-up, The Last Jedi.

“He’s not trying to change it to be something else,” she said of Abrams. “He really respects what it is.”

Russell, who is known for her roles in popular television series Felicity (co-created by Abrams) and The Americans, also described her character, who has previously only been revealed to be “a masked scoundrel,” as “bad ass,” but she didn’t provide further details.

The highly anticipated film — which also stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Mark Hamill, Kelly Marie Tran, Domhnall Gleeson, Lupita Nyong’o — hits theaters Dec. 20.

In addition to Russell, newcomers to the franchise include Richard E. Grant, Naomi Ackie, and more.

Source: https://ew.com/