John Boyega Spoke With Disney Executives After Complaining About His ‘Star Wars’ Storyline
It’s almost a year since the release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and if many fans remain vocally disappointed with the film, their complaints seem minor compared to the ones expressed by John Boyega, a guy who was actually one of the four main stars of the film. In recent months, Boyega has become increasingly candid with the press about his feelings regarding Lucasfilm’s treatment of his character, Finn, which he told GQ was “not good.”
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter tied to Boyega’s role in the anthology film series Small Axe for Amazon, he revealed that his comments have been loud enough that a “Disney executive” actually reached out to him to have a discussion about the problems he raised about Finn — and about the larger issues that Boyega said he was trying to bring attention to, specifically the idea of Disney introducing a “black character, [marketing] them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side.”
As Boyega described the discussion, it sounds pretty candid:
It was a very honest, a very transparent conversation. There was a lot of explaining on their end in terms of the way they saw things. They gave me a chance also to explain what my experience was like. I'd hope that me being so open with my career, at this stage, would help the next man, the guy that wants to be the assistant DOP, the guy that wants to be a producer. I hope that the conversation is not such a taboo or elephant in the room now, because someone just came and said it.
Whether anything changes in light of Boyega’s comments and this subsequent conversation is something that likely won’t be known for a long time — in or out of the Star Wars movie universe, which remains dormant at the moment. Whenever a new Star Wars film does go into production, this will be an interesting dimension that should be worth keeping tabs on.
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