The fourth entry in Entertainment Weekly’s “Rogue One Revelations” series sheds some light on the character that actor Riz Ahmed was originally set to play in the film. According to an early draft of Rogue One, Ahmed was brought onboard to play “a crazed, imprisoned engineer named Bokan” who’s overall description is quite different from his official on-screen character Bodhi Rook. Check out an excerpt from EW’s piece below and then take the provided source link for the full read.
EW’s earlier “Rogue One Revelations” articles can be found via these respective links:
Details on Alternate Ending
Early Draft Had Vader Killing a Major Character
Jyn’s Mother Was Initially a Jedi
Who am I?
That’s the soul-searching question of Bodhi Rook, the defecting Imperial pilot Riz Ahmed played in Rogue One, and throughout the Star Wars standalone film he answered that question with bravery and sacrifice. But in the original drafts of the story he didn’t even exist.
Ahmed took the job thinking he would play someone else.
“His name was Bokan, and he was actually Saw Gerrera’s engineer, living on a planet with a strong electromagnetic field, which meant that electronics were never working,” Ahmed says. “He was actually an Imperial engineer who had been kidnapped and kind of had Stockholm Syndrome. He had been living there for so long, he kind of lost it, like Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now.”
