In response to the growing backlash on social media over the character Rose Tico’s diminished role in “The Rise of Skywalker,” screenwriter Chris Terrio has argued that her screen time was cut strictly for economic purposes — and not out of fan service.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter (THR), the Academy Award-winning screenwriter said that multiple scenes were shot featuring Rose Tico but were ultimately cut.
“Given the abuse that the actor/character has endured the last two years, people are, understandably, quite sensitive over the film’s treatment of Rose Tico,” THR began in its lengthy questioning of Terrio. “Additionally, in a couple of other interviews, I was told of some things that were cut out involving Rose. So, what ultimately happened, and were you and J.J. [Abrams] conscious of how her reduced role would be perceived by those who defended Rose and those who demeaned her?”
“As I’ve said elsewhere before, there were a couple of scenes that we shot with Rose that I wish had made it to the final cut,” Terrio began. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a screenwriter who doesn’t wish that all his scenes were treated as inspired gospel and ended up in the film exactly as written. But it’s the nature of the process that certain scenes fall out of the film, and I very much respect the difficulty of the decisions J.J. had to make, wearing both his screenwriter hat and his director hat — especially given that I know for a fact that J.J. adores and respects Kelly and would have loved to keep every second he shot with her in the film.”
With that said, Terrio argued that “The Rise of Skywalker” indeed featured Rose as an important character whose arc reaches its apex in conjunction with her role in “The Last Jedi.”
“I do think that [‘The Rise of Skywalker’] shows Rose changing, growing, evolving,” said Terrio. “Rose begins her journey in [‘The Last Jedi’] as just about the lowest person on the Resistance totem pole. In [‘The Rise of Skywalker’], Rose is at the right hand of the general, working on military plans and helping to call the shots. I think Kelly does a masterful job of showing us a young woman’s evolution from a starry-eyed admirer of Finn to Resistance leader and strategist who is very much his equal.”
The controversy over actress Kelly Marie Tran’s diminished role in the film reached a fever-pitch last week, when the hashtag #RoseTicoDeservedBetter began trending on Twitter. Many embittered fans lamented the abuse Tran received on social media at the hands of alt-right trolls, arguing that her screen time reduction essentially rewarded the trolls’ behavior. Violet Kim of Slate, who clocked Tran’s screentime in at just one minute and 16 seconds, amplified those concerns extensively.
“Tran’s absence in [‘The Rise of Skywalker’] is especially troubling because she became the target of widespread racist harassment after ‘The Last Jedi’ was released, to the extent that she had to delete her Instagram account,” argued Kim. “That the new movie not only shunts her aside but does so without bringing any closure to her character makes it seem as if Abrams caved into to some of Star Wars’ worst fans, or at the least that there was no involved who understood how deeply Rose’s casual exclusion would hit those to whom she meant so much.”
