“Are you f**king joking?”: The movie scene Thandiwe Newton called a “big mistake”
In the majority of cases, any actor who signs on for a role in a major franchise film either has one eye on a lucrative payday or an even more financially beneficial recurring part in the sequels, but things have never panned out that way for Thandiwe Newton.
Not that she’s actively gone out of her way to appear in as much populist entertainment as possible, but the recurring theme of the star’s flirtations with established properties is that of missed opportunity, unrealised potential, and, in one case, personal and professional regret.
Newton played Nyah Nordoff-Hall in John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II and landed a Golden Raspberry Award for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ into the bargain, but as tended to be the case with any major female character not named Ilsa Faust, she didn’t return in any of the subsequent follow-ups.
She was offered the chance to reprise her role in the ‘threequel’, but turned it down to spend more time with her family, although it wasn’t an experience she was jumping at the chance to relive, having previously described co-star and producer Tom Cruise as a “very dominant individual,” as well as voicing her displeasure with the way her scenes were written and her character was treated.
She was basically scenery-chewing window-dressing as Dame Vaako in Vin Diesel’s The Chronicles of Riddick and didn’t factor into plans for that movie’s sequel, either, before her third – and so far final – flirtation with blockbuster IP in Solo: A Star Wars story led to a heated disagreement that proved to be for nothing in the long run.
A tortured production that saw producer Kathleen Kennedy fire original directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to replace them with Ron Howard very late in the day, Alden Ehrenreich stepped into Harrison Ford’s inimitable shoes for a vastly expensive flop that went down in infamy as the lowest-grossing live-action movie in the franchise’s history, a record it snatched with ease, even with decades of rising ticket prices.
Newton played the cosmic criminal Val, who worked alongside Woody Harrelson’s Tobias Beckett but tried to put her foot down when she discovered she wasn’t supposed to be making it out of Solo alive. Of course, there’s no point in assuming anybody’s really dead for good unless there’s a body, but that didn’t cut it for the actor, who was left furious for a number of valid reasons.
Not best pleased at the way “they just had me blow up and I’m done,” Newton shared to Inverse how she begrudgingly filmed her death scene knowing Solo was making “a big, big mistake.” From her perspective, “You don’t kill off the first Black woman to ever have a real role in a Star Wars movie, like, are you f**king joking?” Unfortunately, the decision had already been made, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Obviously, Star Wars has hardly been averse to the idea of resurrecting dead characters, but when Solo plummeted from a great height at the box office and shattered upon impact, even Newton’s hypothetical chances of being invited to return were over when the spinoff ‘Anthology’ experiment was abandoned entirely in the aftermath.
