76 seconds, that’s the total screen time Kelly Marie Tran clocked in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker.
As big as the franchise is, those behind the scenes aren’t tone deaf to the criticism the sidelining of the Rose Tico character has attracted. Screenwriter Chris Terrio, who won an Oscar in 2013 for writing Argo, is the first from the crew to directly address the controversy.
Speaking to Awards Daily, he explained the difficulty of incorporating old footage of the late Carrie Fisher as Leia into the final saga in part is to blame.
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.
Crazy Rich Asians director Jon Chu has offered up the idea of turning the Rose Tico character into a show on Disney Plus. He’s even suggesting that he’d like to direct it. So far there’s no reaction from the Star Wars universe.
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