One of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' best characters was originally meant to die...
Episode VII spoilers! Beware...
**SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FORCE AWAKENS!**
It turns out that Star Wars: The Force Awakens could have been a lot less awesome, with Oscar Isaac revealing that his character Poe Dameron was originally supposed to die.
In an interview with GQ, Isaac says that Dameron was originally meant to meet his doom early on: the scene where Finn and Poe make their escape from the First Order and crash their stolen Tie Fighter on Jakku. It's here that Finn presumes that Dameron is dead – which he was, in early drafts at least.
Isaac explains how he met director JJ Abrams, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy in Paris, where Abrams sketched out his plan for the fighter pilot character.
"He's amazing!" Abrams told Isaac. "He opens the whole movie."
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But there was a catch: "And then," Abrams added, "he dies."
Oh.
According to the interview, Isaac wasn't thrilled by what would be a glorified cameo role, but took the part anyway.
"I went back home, and I thought about it,” Isaac says. “Then I wrote him and said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it.’ I figured it would be a cameo: I’ll come in, do my thing, and maybe it’s actually better not to have to sign myself up for three movies."
By that time, however, JJ Abrams had decided to keep Dameron around and figured out a way to bring him back, which just seems to be: say he escaped. Genius!
“Let’s say that it was in that conversation that we began to see a way that being in the movie would be worth his time and the audience’s,” Abrams explains cryptically.
Is this the luckiest Star Wars escape yet?
