Now that we’ve all seen Star Wars: The Force Awakens and are watching it lay waste to previous box office records, we can turn our attention to the future of the franchise, and next up is the spinoff movie, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. As we’re still eleven months away from that film, details are in relatively short supply, but a new report may reveal the connection between two characters.
There are potential SPOILERS for Rogue One beyond this point, you’ve been warned.
Though we only have rumors about their identities to go on, Mads Mikkelsen and Felicity Jones are set to play big roles in Rogue One, and a new report that popped up on Making Star Wars may indicate a connection between the two. They’ve heard it multiple times, though it remains unverified, so make of this what you will, but it turns out that Mikkelsen may be Jones’ father.
We’ve heard that Mads Mikkelsen plays a character named Galen in Rogue One, and he is said to be a scientist in charge of construction of the first Death Star on the planet Geonosis, where it was built. According this report, he was instrumental in fixing a number of flaws and problems with the design and has become revered for his contributions to the Empire. He’s not, however, a staunch imperial and appears to be in this more for the science than for creating a weapon of mass destruction—he is compared to Robert Oppenheimer, who helped develop the atomic bomb, in this regard. Wracked with guilt, Galen apparently defects and wants to set things right, and to accomplish this, he turns to his daughter, Felicity Jones, who we’ve heard is named Lyra Erso.
It sounds like Felicity Jones’ character has gone through an evolution as Rogue One came together. At one point early on she was described as a bounty hunter type character (one rumor even said she was Boba Fett’s daughter), but the most recent word we’ve had indicates she’s a Rebel soldier. The plot as we understand it revolves around the theft of the plans for the Death Star that Luke Skywalker and company ultimately use to destroy it, and it’s possible Lyra could be something of a mercenary employed by the Rebel Alliance. Perhaps her father turned to the Rebels to make amends, and he talked her into using her particular set of skills to pull of this heist like no one else can. In the one official photo we’ve seen, she certainly looks like she’s part of a rough-and-tumble crew.
We have a while to wait and see if this pans out, but in the meantime it should be fun and interesting to watch this develop. The first Rogue One trailer will reportedly appear with Captain America: Civil War in May, and the next Star Wars movie opens December 16, 2016.
