If you thought you’d felt the last of the Force for this week, think again! Because today’s Movie Morsels has still more news, interviews, and images from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Plus, a tease for The Divergent Series: Allegiant trailer, a hilarious video interview with the stars of The Night Before, a new trailer and featurette for the Chris Pine-starring The Finest Hours, and more!
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Hell yes, we have more Star Wars: The Force Awakens news to report today! The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly is overflowing with Force-related goodness. Let’s start with the first new info we’ve had in some time on Lupita Nyong’o’s space pirate, Maz Kanata…
“I had some specific ideas about how she would work and what she would do,” says director J.J. Abrams of the mo-cap character, who can be seen between BB-8 and R2-D2 in the film’s poster. “I had this pitch about these goggles that she wore. Her eyes are an important aspect of her character, and you’ll see how it plays out.”
“Her history is that she was a pirate for a long time. She’s lived over a thousand years. She’s had this watering hole for about a century, and it’s like another bar that you’d find in a corner of the Star Wars universe… All that backstory will be forthcoming. In the movie, you don’t learn these things, but I know that these are things that are coming out in other venues.”
Nyong’o herself describes working with motion-capture master Andy Serkis on her performance: “The biggest advice [Andy] gave me, that was so important to hold on to, is a motion-capture character you develop the same way as any other. You have to understand who the character is and what makes them who they are. As an actor for films, your eyes are a lot of the way you communicate anyway. So it was definitely a gift to have that be the means to her magic as a motion-capture character.”
Meanwhile, Serkis has a few words to say about his own character in the film, the villainous Supreme Leader Snoke:
“It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean talk about secrecy! When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance.
“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful. Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose… He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design – you couldn’t have gotten there with prosthetics. It’s too extreme. Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure. You could never have done it [in real life.]
“He’s aware of what’s gone on, in the respect that he has been around and is aware of prior events. I think it’d be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.”
In other Force-ful news, the official IMAX poster for Episode VII has been revealed, and while it’s simpler than the film’s non-IMAX poster, I think it’s just as striking…
And we have two new TV promos for the film, the first of which offers some new behind-the-scenes footage…
The Divergent Series: Allegiant
The first trailer for The Divergent Series: Allegiant will arrive today. Here’s a tease…
Initiates, get a sneak peek at the #Allegiant trailer NOW! See more TOMORROW. #WeAreAllegiant https://t.co/7NuDqoCiTC
— Allegiant (@Divergent) November 12, 2015
Directed by Robert Schwentke — and starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Octavia Spencer, Ray Stevenson, Zoë Kravitz, Miles Teller, Ansel Elgort, Naomi Watts, and Jeff Daniels — the third Divergent film opens on March 18, 2016.
[Twitter]
The Night Before
Nathan for You‘s offbeat Nathan Fielder interviews Seth Rogen, Anthony Mackie, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt about their holiday comedy The Night Before, and the results are every bit as hilariously awkward as one would expect…
The Night Before, directed by Jonathan Levine, hits theaters on November 20th.
The Finest Hours
The Chris Pine-starring nautical disaster drama The Finest Hours has a new trailer and featurette, the latter of which looks as the real life Coast Guard mission the Craig Gillespie-directed film is based on…
Co-starring Holliday Grainger, Erica Bana, Casey Affleck, and Ben Foster, The Finest Hours opens on January 29, 2016.
[Disney]
The Big Short
Finally today, we have a featurette on director Adam McKay’s financial crisis comedy The Big Short, based on Michael Lewis’ 2010 book about the last decade’s housing and credit bubble build-up, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Karen Gillan (yes, that Karen Gillan!), Melissa Leo, and Marisa Tomei star in the December 11th release.
Image Credit: Lucasfilm
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What do you think of today’s top stories? Let us know below. And have a great weekend!
