The cast for Star Wars: Episode VII has just added two more cast members, and this time it is unknowns. Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy announced the new cast members over on StarWars.com in a statement where she trumpeted the fact that Star Wars has always been about “discovering and nurturing young talent.”
The new cast members are American actress Crystal Clarke and British actor Pip Andersen. They were discovered thanks to a casting call in 2013 that brought in over 60,000 applicants. Out of that group, these two youngsters were chosen.
Anderson has a very interesting talent that might come in handy for Star Wars: Episode VII. He is a parkour specialist.
The new cast announcements is a glimpse of good news amongst a flurry of worrisome announcements. Of course, it all started when Harrison Ford injured his leg. Han Solo was supposed to play a major role in the movie, but he will miss a couple of months and Disney refuses to budge from their release date.
This makes it look like Disney would rather make their release date than make the movie the way that J.J. Abrams envisioned it. If Ford misses too much time, Abrams will have to completely change his script and eliminate much of Han Solo’s role. With a franchise as big as Star Wars and a company as big as Disney, that is just how the business is run.
While all this is scary, Kevin Smith has been hollering from the rooftops about how awesome the entire new Stars Wars movie looks. Smith got a set visit and said the entire sets and design brought tears to his eyes. “The Force is WITH this movie,” Smith wrote.
“I saw uniforms, I saw artillery that I haven’t seen since I was a kid,” Smith said. “I saw them shooting an actual sequence in a set that is real — I walked across the set, there were explosions — and it looked like a shot right out of an f–ing Star Wars movie,” he said. Smith also got a tour of “Stage M,” where he he saw the full scale Millennium Falcon and stepped inside to walk around.”
Check out what Kevin Smith said about Star Wars: Episode VII in the video below. His talk about the upcoming movie starts at about 35 minutes.