Willow Star Talks the Importance of LGBTQ+ Representation

By Jamie Jirak

The new Willow series is five episodes deep on Disney+, and the show features an LGBTQ+ romance that fans are loving. While there was a queer couple featured in Andor, Kit (Ruby Cruz) and Jade (Erin Kellyman) in Willow mark the first romance that is front and center in a Lucasfilm project. The duo are longtime friends, but despite the fact that Kit kissed Jade in the first episode, they still have that classic will-they-won't-they energy. In the newest episode, "Wildwood," Kit and Jade finally had another important romantic moment, but things didn't end quite as happily as we'd hoped after a shocking cliffhanger separated them. Recently, Kellyman had a chat with The Hollywood Reporter and talked about the importance of LGBTQ representation in fantasy. 

"I think it's so beautifully written," Kellman shared. "It's been so beautifully created. It's not a story where they're worried about being gay. It's not a story where they're hyper-sexualized. It's just two people being in love. The gender is secondary. They're just in love with each other. I think it's really beautiful and also needed. I think for anybody that is struggling with realizing that they're gay, or knows somebody that's realizing that they're gay, having this normalized representation is just so important."

She added, "It feels like I'm healing my inner child. Having not seen these shows when I was younger, now being able to be the representation that I didn't have is something that is so peaceful. There's something so peaceful about it, something so reassuring and calming. I know that if I saw this when I was a kid, I would have been completely in love with Kit and Jade, and I would have felt a lot less isolated and scared and weird. So, it's just really beautiful to be able to do that now." 

What Does Showrunner Jonathan Kasdan Say About Willow's Queer Representation? 

"It was a totally organic thing," Kasdan recently told Yahoo! Entertainment. "It was not a decision that was ever made because we thought we needed queer representation in the show or that that was something we were intent on doing. What was clear was that we wanted to put at the center of this story a daughter for Madmartigan, who was torn between two people. One of those people was this person she was obligated to marry and was not in love with. And the other one was her best friend, who she was [in love with]." 

He added, "It felt very natural – as the pilot was coming together and the question about who these women are and how they empower the next generation – that that best friend would be female, too," he adds. "It never even occurred to us that we were making a choice to do a queer relationship, so much as it was to a story choice to put Kit into this interesting dynamic of friendships and romances."

The first five episodes of Willow are now streaming on Disney+. 

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