During a conversation on a recent episode of Collider Ladies Night, Kelly Marie Tran spoke about her audition for an Untitled Rian Johnson Project which turned out to be Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
While speaking with Collider, Tran talked about her experience auditioning for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which came out back in 2017. Initially, when she was approached about the project, she was only told that it was a movie being directed by Rian Johnson, but it only took a little bit of digging to figure out that the audition was for Star Wars.
“I remember getting an email, just like you normally would for an audition, but the email said the project was ‘The Untitled Rian Johnson Project,’ which after a little bit of light Googling, it was pretty clear that he was doing Episode VIII,” Tran explained. “We didn’t get sides to prepare. They wouldn’t even let you have them. So we would get to the audition and then you’d be given these sides that were printed on red paper so that you wouldn’t take them with you.”
Tran continued to talk about the first actual audition for the role, which was nothing more than a cold read with a very vague character description.
“It was essentially a cold read, was the first audition. And I remember the character description said, ‘20s, female, character-y,’ and that was it. You didn’t really know anything about it. So yeah, it was wild,” she said. “I will say, the best thing that I did was probably just try as much as possible to be present in the moment and pay attention to what the scene was about, as opposed to trying to act a genre or play to a specific universe if that makes sense.
“There were two scenes and one of them was a scene between myself and John Boyega, Finn. It’s the casino scene where we’re looking for the Master Codebreaker and then the sort of monologue scene where Rose is talking about wanting to put her fist through this lousy, beautiful town.”
Learn more about the interview on Collider Ladies Night here.
