Billy Dee Williams has recalled the backlash he used to get for Lando Calrissian’s actions in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and how he got sick of being taunted for years, even when he was picking up his daughter from school.
“When I would pick my daughter up from school, the kids would run up to me and say, ‘You betrayed Han Solo!’ … I’d go on an airplane and the airplane stewards would say, ‘You betrayed Han Solo!'” Williams joked to the Dagobah Dispatch podcast. “I got that for a lot of years. So finally, I said, ‘Look, think about the whole situation. You’re up against a pretty formidable character in Darth Vader. And then there’s, of course, Boba Fett. And these people were invading my space and I had to bargain with them. But the bargain at least prevented the complete demise of Han Solo and his friends. But I had to hold on to my whole situation.”
He continued, “So I found myself explaining all this stuff to a point where I finally said to people, ‘Look, I’m tired of explaining all of this.’ I said, ‘Did anybody die? Nobody died!’ I think that was a clear indication that Lando was trying to figure something out and he was trying to figure out primarily how to hold onto his situation without the complete demise of his friend.”
The actor also looked back on Lando’s debut in the saga, in the iconic scene in which Lando comes out to greet Han, Leia, and Chewbacca on a Cloud City platform, first appearing antagonistic before embracing Han.
“For me it was kind of a pivotal, classic, dubious hero moment, and I just wanted to make the best of it,” Williams confessed of the sequence. “I wanted to do something really interesting with it. I was always thinking: Let me do this and not make people conscious of the fact that I am a particular ethnicity. I didn’t want that to be the focus or the focal point in introducing that character. It was me, Billy Dee, doing what Billy Dee does.”
Listen to Billy Dee Williams on the latest episode of the Dagobah Dispatch podcast, appearing in support of his upcoming memoir What Have We Here?, available from February 13th, and available for preorder now from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.
