SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains MINOR SPOILERS for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Proceed at your own risk.
Among all the other thoughts you’ll have after absorbing The Rise of Skywalker, one of the biggest questions swirling around your brain will be… where do the DVD extras go these days? Sorry, no – that’s General Hux actor, Domhnall Gleeson’s most pressing question of the press tour to promote Episode IX, the latest and reportedly final instalment in the Skywalker Saga.
When we sat down with Gleeson and co-star Richard E. Grant – who plays newcomer to the franchise, First Order boss Allegiant General Pryde – we discussed, among other things, deleted scenes. Which led to both actors ruing the fact that a scene they shot, which they had expected to see at the start of the film, didn’t make the final cut.
“Opening sequence of the movie — we were both all caped up and watching this battle going on. And then I thought, ‘Any moment, any moment now we’re going to appear’. Didn’t,” says Grant.
Three Little Words
Indeed, your most urgent question probably won’t be ‘Can I see this scene on the DVD extras and where can I find DVD extras these days anyway?’ The question you’re more likely asking yourself is… what was it that Finn so desperately wanted to tell Rey, that he never got the chance to impart to his partner in heroism?
While some of us might be thinking it was meant to be the moment he reveals his Force sensitivity to the now-accomplished Jedi, Grant thinks it was something far more heartfelt.
“I think he wanted to say those three magic words every human being longs to hear from the moment you draw your first breath,” he says.
Gleeson jokes that those words are “Are you single?”, but it amounts to the same thing. In case there’s any doubt, Grant is suggesting that Finn had wanted to declare his love to Rey.
While The Last Jedi saw a deep bond grow between John Boyega’s Finn and Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico, the Resistance mechanic is ingloriously shoved aside in The Rise of Skywalker. Instead, Finn is given space to re-stoke the feelings we first glimpsed during The Force Awakens – before fans decided Poe was the real object of his affections – and that we see again at the start of Episode VIII, when Finn emerges from his medical pod with just one question for Poe: “Where’s Rey?”
Hux and Pryde Spin-Off?
What this does, of course, is leave a pretty major question unanswered that could be ripe for exploring in another instalment. So what would a hypothetical Episode X look like?
Grant will only say, “I think that’s a bad idea… don’t go into double digits. Stick to one to nine,” while Gleeson does at least entertain the notion of a Hux and Pryde spin-off, which Grant is calling “HuxandPryde.com”.
Says Gleeson, “When you say ‘spin-off’, I always think of a sitcom. And the whole thing of, like, ‘filmed in front of a live studio audience’, [featuring] Hux and Pryde living together … something about it doesn’t seem right.”
So you say, Gleeson. Something about it seems very right to us…
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is out now.