Much has been made of the presence, or lack thereof, of Kelly Marie Tran's Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Now, after Twitter users made their feelings felt about her screen time, another tidbit has been revealed around the choices with the cast. Dominic Monaghan revealed that he got his Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker part in the strangest way possible. When he won a football bet, he got written into the movie by his friend J.J. Abrams. In a conversation on an Inverse podcast, he explained how the entire situation went down. Fans of the actress are none too pleased and letting their frustrations be known on Twitter.
Monaghan began, "At the start of that game, because J.J. is a motherfucker in the best way possible, he emailed me and he said, 'I think I have a Star Wars part for you.' And I wrote back and said, 'Brilliant, I won't bother you but let me know if there's anything I can do or what I can say.' He wrote back and said, 'If England beat Colombia, you're in.' I was like, oh mate, you bastard."
Screenwriter Chris Terrio tried to explain how some technical concerns led to the relatively small screen time for Rose in the latest film.
"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 Fisher's footage in the way we wanted to," Terrio explained to Awards Daily. "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," Terrio added.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stars a returning Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo, Billie Lourd, and Greg Grunberg. New cast members include Naomi Ackie, Richard E. Grant, Keri Russell, and Dominic Monaghan, and the returning veteran actors are Mark Hamill, Anthony Daniels, Billy Dee Williams, and Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor. Leia star in the film using unreleased footage of Carrie Fisher from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Check out some of the responses to the casting news below: