Posted in: Movies | Tagged: film, HRL

Denis Lawson, Wedge Antilles from Star Wars, Did Not Reject Doing the New Films After All

In 2014, Devin Faraci reported that the actor Denis Lawson, who played Rebel Alliance pilot Wedge Antilles, in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, had turned down returning to the movie franchise because he didn't want to. But it turns out that isn't exactly the case.

Faraci stated that Lawson, at a screening of his movie The Machine, said, "They asked me, but it just would have bored me," and that he said he would return if the role of Wedge was increased rather than the cameo we saw voiced by another actor in Rogue One.

However, on BBC Radio 4's Loose Ends tonight, talking to Clive Anderson, he reminisced about filming Star Wars in 1976, but rejected the assertion that he declined to take part in any of the new films because he didn't want to do it:

"That's falsely recorded, they did ask me to do it, frustratingly I wasn't free. I would like to set that record straight. I was shooting on something else, I'd have loved to have done it… ask me again!"

He also mentioned coaching his nephew Ewan McGregor — who, yes, played Ben Kenobi in the prequels — in his first screen role, Dennis Potter's Lipstick On Your Collar, and teaching him how to hit marks on a set without looking at them, by way of a strategically placed sock on the floor. Of course, Ewan has worn strategically placed socks since. But it was that experience that led him to wrote The Actor and the Camera, to help young actors cope with the demands of a shooting set.

He also talked about working on Local Hero as the most fun he's ever had on a film set, noting that movie was Peter Capaldi's first screen role, and how the movie could be remade today with a Donald Trump analogue for the Burt Lancaster role, as a rich and powerful American trying to buy up a beach in Scotland, with one guy in a hut who refuses to move…

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