20 Things You Didn't Know About Solo: A Star Wars Story

If you thought that the sacrificial death of Tobias Beckett's (Woody Harrelson) wife Val (Thandiwe Newton) seemed a bit sudden and unceremonious at the end of the botched coaxium heist, that's because it wasn't in the original script.

In a recent interview with Inverse, Newton confirmed that Val's fate was changed during filming, and that she was massively disappointed that one of the few prominent Black characters in the franchise was killed so swiftly:

"I felt disappointed by Star Wars that my character was killed. And, actually, in the script, she wasn't killed. It happened during filming. And it was much more just to do with the time we had to do the scenes. It's much easier just to have me die than it is to have me fall into a vacuum of space so I can come back sometime.

That's what it originally was: that the explosion and she falls out and you don't know where she's gone. So I could have come back at some point. But when we came to filming, as far as I was concerned and was aware, when it came to filming that scene, it was too huge a set-piece to create, so they just had me blow up and I'm done.

I remembered at the time thinking, 'This is a big, big mistake' - not because of me, not because I wanted to come back. You don't kill off the first Black woman to ever have a real role in a Star Wars movie. Like, are you f**king joking?"

You can't fault her logic here, really. Newton's a terrific actress who quickly made Val an appealing character we wanted to see more of. No such luck.