Big Sunday Press Conference Details

Entertainment Weekly did a detailed recap of the press conference which featured Rian Johnson, Mark Hamill, John Boyega, Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, Adam Driver, Andy Serkis, Domnhall Gleeson, and Gwendoline Christie.

Some highlights:

First and foremost, we were trying to make it feel like a Star Wars movie” — which means, [Rian Johnson] promised, that the film will have “the intensity, and the opera” we’ve come to expect as well as the “key ingredient” that The Last Jedi will make you want to run to you backyard and play with your toy lightsaber.

Gleeson wanted to see the film with the crowds when it opened, so he skipped the cast screening, a decision which, after hearing his co-stars’ rapturous responses, he now regrets.

One of the journalists in the audience asked about the partnership of Luke Skywalker training Rey, but Hamill wasn’t having it: “Well, you’re assuming that I train Rey,” he said. “People ask if it was difficult to pick up and wield a lightsaber again, and I go, ‘Do I?’” All he would promise is that “my part is twice as big as it was in the last one.”

“I just want to pay tribute to Rian for being one of the most brilliantly subversive filmmakers I’ve ever [worked with],” Dern added

So how was it for Hamill, having now played both sides of that hero meeting? “I don’t think any line in the script epitomized my reaction more than, ‘This is not going to go the way you think.’

Boyega observed, “There hasn’t been a Star Wars movie yet that has explored war in the way The Last Jedi does. It’s very messy.” Isaac agreed, “It’s a dire situation, it’s critical, the resistance is on its last legs

As the press conference drew to a close, Isaac brought it back to the amazing women of the galaxy. “As a guy, I’d like to say, for me, the most formative people in my life have been women,” he said. “So that has shaped my destiny so much, so to see that reflected in the film, is really, really beautiful, and it is more true to real life and what’s happened now, but what’s always happened.” Serkis, however, wants none of it — or at least his character doesn’t. “Speaking as the head of the First Order, Snoke is very unimpressed that there is such a huge female force that has been growing in the universe.”

“Something about Carrie that I really look up to and that I didn’t realize until recently was how much courage it takes to be yourself when you’re on a public platform,” Tran said, concluding the series of odes. “She was so unapologetic and so openly herself, and that is something that I’ve tried to do, but that’s hard. I think she will always be an icon as Leia, but also as Carrie. What an example.”

Read the entire rundown at EW.

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