When it comes to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Disney has been having trouble keeping their usual totalitarian grip on information. Mads Mikkelsen let slip that he was playing the protagonist’s dad, pages from a visual guide leaked, and rumors of reshoots and a troubled first cut swept the web. But perhaps the biggest spoiler of all spilled out of the mouth of ensemble member Jiang Wen today at Star Wars Celebration Europe, during a high-profile panel about the film. Spoilers below, obviously.
We’d already known the Chinese actor would be playing a mercenary named Baze Malbus, and that the character would be a companion of the blind “spiritual warriorâ€Â Chirrut Imwe, played by Donnie Yen. What we didn’t know, and surely were not supposed to know, is that Chirrut apparently dies by the film’s end. After a charmingly goofy bit of babbling in broken English about how Baze “has a gun, he has a huge gun, he has a weapon, the weapon’s very huge,†Jiang talked about his relationship with his blind pal.
“He and me was a partner and he believe of course, believe in Force,†Jiang said. “But my character don’t believe Force at that time. But I pretend all of them, not them, just them, to do very, very big mission. I cannot say that. And when this guy dead, I do something better. Maybe I believe, by my action, he’s thinker, I’m doer.â€
“I think you’ve gotta leave it there!†interjected a panicked Gwendoline Christie, who was emceeing the panel.
“Anyway, I have a gun,†he concluded.
Well! How about that! It’s certainly possible that this was some kind of mistranslation or that we misheard what he said. Or maybe it’s a red herring! But it seems most likely that this particular Force-sensitive cat is out of the bag. We’d spell “Whoops†in Aurebesh, but Unicode doesn’t support the character set.