With Star Wars: The Force Awakens behind, us we now have the pleasure of turning our attention to Star Wars: Rogue One, the second in our three consecutive Decembers of new Star Wars movies. Rumors have slowly been leaking out that have begun to give us some details about the team that has been tasked with stealing the Death Star plans. Today’s rumor deals with one of the most mysterious of the group, the character played by Chinese actor Jiang Wen.
The unrelenting source of all the details you did, and did not, want to know over at Making Star Wars has some new information about the character, the guy in the upper right corner of the image above, which makes him sound like the toughest SOB on the team.
I’ve learned that Wen’s character is the weapons enthusiast of the group. He’s a first-class gun nut. He’s the kind of character that just as you think he’s exhausted his potential for violence, he pulls another weapon out of his boot (for example). He probably has as many concealed weapons as he does overtly visible ones (if not more).
While this sounds like a type of character that we may have seen in other movies before, it’s a new character type for the Star Wars universe. If nothing else, a Star Wars gun nut will likely let the prop department have some fun creating new weapons for him to play with.
When we put this detail together with the other nuggets that we have about Jiang Wen’s character, we start to get a little better picture, assuming that all the pieces do, in fact fit. Previously, we had understood that the character is actually a bounty hunter with rebel sympathies. These two items certainly match as it wouldn’t be surprising that a bounty hunter also likes his variety of weapons. However, the other detail was that his character’s code name would be Seal Communicator. The name makes it sound like he’s the team communications officer, which is an odd place to put the guy who’s also a munitions expert. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he could be both things, but it is a rather unusual pairing.
Jiang Wen is a pretty big movie star in China so his addition to the cast will likely boost the movie’s overseas success, something that is probably viewed as even more important by Disney now considering that Star Wars: The Force Awakens didn’t do nearly as well in China as was expected.
Star Wars: Rogue One will be released in theaters December 16, 2016.
