Star Wars Screenwriter Explains Kelly Marie Tran's Reduced Role in Rise of Skywalker

A screenwriter for the latest "Star Wars" film is responding to criticism over the fact that Kelly Marie Tran's character, Rose Tico, appears in "The Rise of Skywalker" for a total of 76 seconds.

Chris Terrio, who co-wrote the movie with director J.J. Abrams, told Awards Daily that Tico's role was originally supposed to be more significant; however, many of her scenes were shot with General Leia Organa, whose performance was created using Carrie Fisher's deleted scenes from "The Force Awakens," and the post-production team ran into issues making the footage appear believable.

"One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie Fisher's footage in the way we wanted to," Terrio explained. "We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn't leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together ... As the process evolved, a few scenes we'd written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we'd hoped for. Those scenes, unfortunately, fell out of the film."

He added: "The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose. We adore the character, and we adore Kelly -- so much so that we anchored her with our favorite person in this galaxy, General Leia."

The Resistance engineer was introduced to the franchise in Rian Johnson's "The Last Jedi," where she had a major role in the film. In fact, it was celebrated as the first major "Star Wars" role for an Asian actress.

As such, Tran's fans have been protesting "The Rise of Skywalker" using the hashtag campaign #RoseTicoDeservedBetter, which was started by "Crazy Rich Asians" director Jon M. Chu, who's offered to direct a "Star Wars" series about Tico if Disney+ were to get on board.

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