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The ending of “Rogue One” was so top secret, the cast didn’t even know about it until they saw the movie

The ending of “Rogue One” was so top secret, the cast didn’t even know about it until they saw the movie
The ending of “Rogue One” was so top secret, the cast didn’t even know about it until they saw the movie

When the cast of Rogue One were making the rounds during their massive press tour, they repeatedly told interviewers that the set was incredibly secretive and they were often kept in the dark that way spoilers wouldn’t get leaked. Now we’re learning just how secretive things were on the set.

Riz Ahmed, who played pilot Bodhi Rook, recently revealed to Entertainment Tonight that he had no idea how the film was going to end. Most people knew that the film was taking place before Episode IV: A New Hope but nobody, including the cast, knew that the film was taking place literally right before the beloved first film.

Ahmed revealed that he didn’t know about the Darth Vader scene at the end until he was watching it in the theater for the first time.

“They kept that from us!” He explained. “That was never in the script. We didn’t know about it! It was the first time we saw it, so it was like, ‘Oh okay, the film’s finished… Darth Vader? Epilogue? Uh…What is going on here?’ and we just all started shouting, and cheering and clapping in a screening room — Yeah, that was a sneaky one, that was sneaky.”

It ~was~ such a shocking but amazing scene to watch and we love that even the cast got to be surprised and react like regular fans.

Ahmed also recently opened up to Entertainment Weekly about how much his character evolved during the process of creating Rogue One. While we couldn’t imagine the film without Bodhi, apparently Ahmed was supposed to play an engineer named Bokan.

“His name was Bokan, and he was actually Saw Gerrera’s (Forest Whitaker) engineer, living on a planet with a strong electromagnetic field, which meant that electronics were never working,” he said. “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.”

While that idea sounds amazing, we’re glad they changed him to Bodhi Rook, the pilot. Ahmed said a lot of the changes came from ideas that the cast, writers, and director Gareth Edwards had along the way.

“We just kept throwing up ideas and just took opportunities to change it — and then, when we came back for the re-shoots, it was like, ‘we’re going to meet your character right at the start now, as opposed to meeting him at the halfway point. That takes a lot of guts as filmmakers, when you’ve got something 90 percent finished to go, ‘oh no no no wait. Let’s just unpick all this stuff because, actually, it could be even cooler.’ And usually, you don’t have the budget to that — but they did it.”

Not gonna lie, Rogue One seemed like an incredible film to work on but also super stressful so props to the cast and especially the writers and Edwards for being able to pull one over on so many people and make such a stunning film.