I’m hoping there will be a director’s cut so we’ll get to see more and more of the stuff that was filmed. I wasn’t there all the time, but even in the short time that I was there, there was so much stuff filmed that didn’t make it to the theatrical version.
You met J.J. during the casting process for Lost, and then you got to know him during the pilot, which he directed. Do you remember mentioning to him way back then that you were a Star Wars fan?
Yeah, I met J.J. when we were doing Lost, and we very quickly had a rapport. Although, you’d have to get that confirmed from J.J.; I don’t want to put words in his mouth. I remember making the pilot on Oahu [Hawaii] and in our downtime, J.J. and I would talk about Star Wars. He’s obviously a movie buff and a movie nerd like I am. At one point, we were talking about Star Wars, and it was just the normal stuff that you talk about as Star Wars fans: favorite character, favorite planet, favorite villain, where would you go if you had the Millennium Falcon, favorite moment…. All those kind of questions. To watch him and hear his stories about the adventures on The Force Awakens was brilliant. I’ve been lucky enough to be friends with J.J. for 15 years now, so I’m able to have fun with him and playfully try and convince him to put me in a movie, which he eventually did.
Did you lobby for a role once J.J. was hired to direct The Force Awakens in 2013?I don’t think we think of it as she’s going to live there. We thought of it as just paying her respects and sort of undoing the original sin at the end of the third movie, which is the separation of the twins. I mean, of course, they had to be separated to keep them safe, and the trilogy wouldn’t exist, the six movies wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t been separated! But that felt to us like it was almost like a wrong that need to be righted. We very deliberately in the script described the wrapping of the sabers, as ‘like you were wrapping infants.’ That’s the thing that you see at the of the third movie, where the two infants are wrapped, and one is sent to Tatooine to be a farmer, and one is sent to Alderaan to be a princess. Leia’s home doesn’t exist anymore, so we thought, ‘Well, Luke could take Leia to his home where he grew up, and where we first saw Star Wars.‘