Spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens ahead, as original screenwriter Michael Arndt details the original plan for Luke Skywalker.
In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Luke Skywalker is conspicuously absent. In fact, the very first line of the intro crawl is, “Luke Skywalker has vanished.”
We spend the next couple of hours with Finn, Rey and Han Solo, and Luke himself only shows up at the very end of the movie. And he doesn’t have a single line of dialogue.
While fans seem fairly happy with this, and are looking forward to seeing Luke’s role in Episode VIII expand, the original plan was apparently to introduce Luke much earlier in the film.
Screenwriter Michael Arndt, who completed an early draft of the film before J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan took over, tells EW, “Early on I tried to write versions of the story where [Rey] is at home, her home is destroyed, and then she goes on the road and meets Luke. And then she goes and kicks the bad guy’s ass.”
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That’s kind of what ended up happening with Han Solo, but the reason it didn’t work with Luke was allegedly because, “every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over. Suddenly you didn’t care about your main character anymore because, ‘Oh f–k, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do’,” says Arndt.
While Rey is certainly not a character to be easily upstaged, it kind of makes sense. By setting up Finn and Rey as the main protagonists, with Han Solo as their link to the original trilogy, J.J. Abrams obtained a fine balance of old and new.
Where Han is pretty much as he was, Luke has obviously been very changed by his experiences. The audience would likely be trying to solve the puzzle of Luke Skywalker throughout the movie; leaving his reveal until the final moments left us free to focus fully on our new set of heroes.
Arndt also discusses the R2-D2 and C-3PO reveals, and the decision to leave R2 in low-power mode for most of the film.
“I had originally written R2 and C-3PO showing up together, and Larry [Lawrence Kasdan] very intelligently said, ‘You want to keep them separate from each other. And of course I’m like, ‘No, no, no, Larry. You don’t get it at all!’”
But what Kasdan was getting at was that R2’s reveal had to be “delayed gratification.” The Force Awakens cleverly spaces out the character re-introductions, making each moment special. And R2-D2 is undoubtedly one of the most popular, iconic characters in the franchise.