Kelly Marie Tran’s Reduced Star Wars Role Explained

As they say in Star Wars, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”

Kelly Marie Train who portrays Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi had a significantly reduced role in the newest sequel Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. After outcry from fans and critics on her limited screen time, a Star Wars writer has explained the reason why.

According to an awards Awards Daily interview, screenwriter Chris Terio discloses the plan was for “Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia”. He continues by stating due to Carrie Fisher’s death, it became increasingly harder to incorporate Rose because of the “difficulty of using Carrie’s footage in the way we wanted to.” Ultimately he states “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. “

Terio clarifies it was never intentional to leave Tran’s character out, but that’s the way things ended up in the final version of the film. This isn’t Tran’s first brush with social media uproar. She ultimately left all social media due to cyber bullying after 2017’s The Last Jedi.

Deadline reports fellow actor Jon M. Chu has volunteered to create a Star Wars spin off series based on Rose Tico for Disney Plus. See Jon’s tweet below and sound off in the comments about Tran’s Rise of Skywalker role.