10 Fantastic Actors Who Were Wasted In Recent Movies
9. Lupita Nyong'o - Star Wars: Rise Of The Skywalker
The Star Wars Skywalker trilogy went out with a bit of a whimper in 2019 with The Rise of Skywalker. Following on from the divisive The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker made the safe choice to not veer into the skid and in all honesty was poorer for it. The third installment is just extremely predictable and, quite frankly, joyless- even the superb visuals can't really pull it up from just a deeply mediocre film.
Perhaps the most criminal aspect of the film is its seeming inability to know what to do with many of its characters or actors. This is most notable with Lupita Nyong'o's Maz Kanata. Nyong'o proved herself more than capable of leading the line in a film while playing two parts in Jordan Peele's fantastic Us, but The Rise of Skywalker utilizes her as little more than an occasional exposition dump here.
This mis-step by Abrams and his team is extremely disappointing for Star Wars fans as Maz Kanata had promised to be such an interesting character in The Force Awakens and never really kicked on. But it is even more disappointing for fans of movies to see Lupita Nyong'o so criminally underused.