Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker screenwriter explains Rose Tico's limited role

One of the breakout characters from Star Wars: The Last Jedi had a significantly limited role in its follow-up, The Rise of Skywalker. Now one of the film’s co-writers has explained her exclusion.

Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, had a significant role in the second movie in the new Star Wars trilogy, helping Finn during their adventure on Canto Bight. That is why it was confusing to many fans when filmmakers reduced her role in The Rise of Skywalker.

In a recent interview with Awards Daily, Chris Terrio, who wrote The Rise of Skywalker with J.J. Abrams, explained why Rose was not featured more. From the conversation, it seemed more of a technical reason than a creative one.

“Well, first of all, J.J. and I adore Kelly Marie Tran. One of the reasons that Rose has a few less scenes than we would like her to have has to do with the difficulty of using Carrie’s [Fisher] footage in the way we wanted to. We wanted Rose to be the anchor at the rebel base who was with Leia. We thought we couldn’t leave Leia at the base without any of the principals who we love, so Leia and Rose were working together,” he said.

“As the process evolved, a few scenes we’d written with Rose and Leia turned out to not meet the standard of photorealism that we’d hoped for. Those scenes, unfortunately, fell out of the film. The last thing we were doing was deliberately trying to sideline Rose. We adore the character, and we adore Kelly – so much so that we anchored her with our favorite person in this galaxy, General Leia.”

From the image above, it looks like there were to be scenes between Rose and Rey as well, which also found their way to the cutting-room floor.

With special editions of movies released all the time, there is a good chance these deleted scenes will see the light of day. Along with filmmakers like John M. Chu wanting to spearhead a Rose Tico Disney+ series, there’s still hope for more Rose within the Star Wars universe.