When it comes to bad guys, you can’t go wrong with casting Benicio del Toro. Excluding Mickey Rourke, he’s the best thing about Sin City and we recently saw him ham it up as The Collector in Guardians of the Galacy. He must have dug his dealings with Disney, because TheWrap is reporting that Benicio has been offered the villain role in Star Wars: Episode VIII. The eighth entry will be directed by the ridiculously talented Rian Johnson and will be released in 2017.
There’s a lot to like about this possibility. Not only does it continue to add diversity to this new trilogy of Star Wars films (bad guys need to be diverse too! Heck, we’re getting a female Stormtrooper captain, and she looks awesome), but it calls into question the future of the upcoming villains, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). Are they not going to stick around through all three films? Will their roles be diminished by an even bigger villain? Del Toro oozes menace and could easily be a heavy hitter in the First Order’s ranks, possibly outranking Kylo Ren. Or maybe he’s a villanous rogue, giving us an anti-Han Solo. Even if Del Toro doesn’t get cast (he probably will and I hope he will), this lets us know that there’s at least one more big villain to add to the mix.
The flood of Star Wars stuff is just on the horizon, so expect more news like this to start rearing its head as we inch ever closer to that December release date for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
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