Kathleen Kennedy Reveals The ‘Rogue One’ Character That Will Be Explored In Future ‘Star Wars’ Releases

WARNING: There are SPOILERS ahead for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. So proceed cautiously if you’ve not seen the blockbuster.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story introduced us to a whole new posse of characters. Unfortunately the ending of the film means that it will be quite hard for all of them to return in future installments from the franchise.

However, Kathleen Kennedy, a producer on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and the president of Lucasfilm, has now teased that there is one character that will almost certainly be brought back into the Star Wars universe, revealing that they have plans for Saw Gerrera to return.

Kathleen Kennedy explained to Empire Magazine,

“With Saw Gerrera, we just became very intrigued with him as a character [from The Clone Wars] and how he fits inside this story….To be honest, we originally thought we were going to develop Saw into something much larger, but we couldn’t accommodate it. So he is not in the movie as much as we would like to have him in the movie, which creates the opportunity to explore his character even further in our future development.”

This was something that Forest Whitaker, who portrayed Saw Gerrera in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, was rather excited about; however, since the character died in the blockbuster, it is more likely that a younger actor will be asked to portray him. When he was informed of Kathleen Kennedy’s plan, Forest Whitaker responded to this revelation during the same interview,

“I’m curious about what else they’re about to do. Because they seem to really like the character, which is great!”

Those of you that don’t know who Saw Gerrera is can get an update courtesy of Forest Whitaker himself, who also provided a brief overview of why the character is so important in the Star Wars canon. Forest Whitaker explained,

“He’s a battered war veteran who has fashioned himself as a freedom fighter. But because they need to make sure that they need to win this battle, he starts to take more extreme points of view. So a lot of the other rebel fighters won’t associate with him, and consider Saw as an extremist in the fight against the Empire. All that back story he has — he trained with Anakin Skywalker, Obi-wan Kenobi and Padawan Tano, you know — really blends in beautifully with where we meet him [in Rogue One]. Which is more of a war-torn veteran, suffering and injured from battles and wars.”

But when are Kathleen Kennedy and the powers that be over at Lucasfilm going to sort out the future plans for the Star Wars franchise? Kennedy told Entertainment Weekly in the weeks before Rogue One hit that those conversations were gonna be saved until the blockbuster has been released into cinemas, revealing that they would iron out the future schedule for Star Wars films in the early weeks of the New Year.

Kathleen Kennedy remarked,

“That’s a conversation going on right now, too. I have to honestly tell you, could we [do nothing but stand alones]? Sure. But I don’t know. We are looking at all of that. There are [possible movies] that we have been talking a lot about. But we are planning to sit down in January, since we will have had The Force Awakens released, now Rogue One, and we’ve finished shooting Episode VIII. We have enough information where we can step back a little bit and say, ‘What are we doing? What do we feel is exciting? And what are some of the things we want to explore?'”

We’ve still got quite a few Star Wars films on the horizon to contend with, as Episode 8 and Episode 9 will be released in 2017 and 2019, respectively, while a Han Solo film is coming in 2018, and another Anthology film, which is rumored to revolve around Boba Fett, will be released in 2020. There’s every chance that a younger Saw Gerrera could pop up in these films, too.

[Featured Image by Lucasfilm]