Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
The third excerpt from Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath: Life Debt features Maz Kanata, the orange alien played by Lupita Nyong’o who made her Star Wars debut in The Force Awakens. It seems that Maz features in an interlude, not the main ongoing story like our previous excerptees. As excepts go, it’s the shortest so far: You can read it at USA Today.
Aftermath: Life Debt will be out in hardcover and eBook on Tuesday.
Episode VIII director Rian Johnson shared a new image from the set today on his Tumblr, featuring Maz Kanata and (presumably) definitely not Lupita N’yongo.
Lupita Nyong’o shared a new behind-the-scenes clip from the Blu-Ray for #MazMonday – there’s also now a Maz Kanata emoji in the Star Wars app
→ Harrison Ford’s Tumblr Q&A was about what you’d expect, but he did talk about the ending of the film and praise some of his costars. Read all his answers.
→ Daisy Ridley and John Boyega both won Empire awards this weekend, and then proceeded to be adorable with them.
→ The cover to Marvel’s The Force Awakens #1 is… Certainly a comic book cover.
Entertainment Weekly has revealed Hasbro’s Maz Kanata action figure, which will debut at Toy Fair this weekend.
Sadly, for the established collectors, Maz won’t be available on her own. She’ll be released this spring as part of a “Takodana Encounter” playset along with Rey, BB-8 and Finn, for $19.99. Two female characters in one pack? Hasbro, you’re trying!
There’s another behind-the-scenes look at the visual effects of The Force Awakens at Variety. The nearly 11-minute video features visual effects supervisors Roger Guyett and Patrick Tubach, creature supervisor Neal Scanlan, and special effects supervisor Chris Corbould.
Lucasfilm has released stills of Supreme Leader Snoke and Maz Kanata to Entertainment Weekly. They’re watermarked, but hopefully better versions will be found soon. (I nabbed the one above from Twitter.)
Now Wired has blueprints of Starkiller Base. Or the set, anyway.
→ New Leia and Han banners have been spotted rotating on a digital billboard in Times Square. The Rey, Kylo Ren and Finn ones have been spotted before, but you can’t beat John Boyega’s reaction. UPDATE: Here’s Daisy Ridley’s.
→ Much ado has been made about the recent George Lucas interview on CBS, but I think Full of Sith has the best take on it, so I’ll leave it to them.
→ Waiting on better copies, but if you don’t mind fuzzy ones, there’s a new Disney Channel TV spot that contains our first (brief) look at Maz Kanata actually in the film, and another commercial that features two new X-wing pilots – one we think is Jessika Pava (as seen in The Weapon of a Jedi) and a Sullustan.
→ There’s a cute new TV spot with Threepio, Artoo and BB-8 from British telecommunications provider O2. Like the Verizon ad we’re seeing over here, it doesn’t contain any actual movie footage. (Is that Sean Bean narrating?)
→ A leaked Look and Find book has some spoilers for The Force Awakens. Read it if you dare. (Via Making Star Wars, who notes that it confirms some thing they’ve already leaked.)
Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata is indeed the orange alien we see on the poster, J.J. Abrams confirms to Entertainment Weeky, and the googles are an important part of her character:
Her eyes have special meaning and power. “I had some specific ideas about how she would work and what she would do,” Abrams says. “I had this pitch about these goggles that she wore. Her eyes are an important aspect of her character, and you’ll see how it plays out.”
He also says she was a pirate for a very long time, and “she’s lived over a thousand years. She’s had this watering hole for about a century, and it’s like another bar that you’d find in a corner of the Star Wars universe.”