Solo Had 2 Big Story Changes After Director Change (POSSIBLE SPOILERS)

– Paul Bettany recently spoke with Huffington Post about how intergalactic gangster Dryden Vos was originally going to be a CGI character played by Michael K. Williams in Solo: A Star Wars Story, but scheduling conflicts led to him taking over…

“They took the opportunity to have a rethink when Michael K. Williams [was unavailable]. Michael K. Williams is a brilliant actor, and the risk you run when you’re a brilliant actor is you’re in demand constantly. So he was busy when they came to do reshoots. I’ve never run that risk, so I was gainfully unemployed. His misfortune was my fortune. They thought [about] whether it should be a CG character or a more human-like character, and that was it really. Ron, I think in his vision, wanted him to be more of a sort of oligarch and perhaps some sort of romantic threat to Han.”

– Also, writers Lawrence and his son Jonathan Kasdan stated that the Kessel Run sequence in the film went through “a million changes.” They commented…

Lawrence: “It was the hardest sequence in the movie to decide on because we knew we wanted to do it from the get-go,” he said. “But what is [a parsec] exactly? And what makes it as hard as it is? And how long [would it take]? Since a parsec is not a unit of time, it’s a unit of distance. And how do you clarify that thing?”

Jonathan: “It’s a funny problem because it’s one of those throwaway things in the original ‘Star Wars’ that’s very much the essence of what’s so great about ‘Star Wars,’” Jonathan said. “To say, ‘Are you kidding? This is the ship that did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs?’ and no one knows what any part of that sentence means. It got an added layer when Ron came in,” said Jonathan, “because he came out of shooting ‘Rush,’ having a great experience with ‘Rush,’ and really connecting to the idea of a race car driver and how can this be the story of a race car driver.”