10 Things We Learned at the 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' D23 Panel
Lucasfilm brought out the big guns Saturday at D23 and fans weren't disappointed.
A sold-out crowd saw most of the new Star Wars movie's cast and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the making of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi."
There's a lot to process here -- our brains kind of melted a bit, honestly -- so let's just dive right in on what the Force brought to the convention center:
1. Director Rian Johnson took the stage and shared an anecdote about his first job at Disney -- rather, at The Disney Channel. There, he made on-air promos.
2. We got our first real good look at Laura Dern and Benicio Del Toro's characters. Dern plays Vice Admiral Holdo and Oscar-winner Del Toro is a mysterious character that the production nicknamed "D.J."
3. One still projected in the giant convention hall was of Holdo, scowling down at Poe Dameron.
4. Johnson loved to take black-and-white stills during production, and he revealed one to the hall of Holdo, in the fog, holding a thin-barreled blaster.
5. Dern admitted that, when she first fired the blaster, she made the "pew pew" sound of laser fire. Awesome.
6. We sawKelly Marie Tran, who plays Resistance mechanic Rose, in a First Order officer's uniform. She is standing next to Finn, who is also in an officer's uniform. They seem to be infiltrating a First Order ship or base.
7. Del Toro's character looks sinister-ish. We saw him rocking a brown duster, and a light beard, sitting at a console on what looks to be a spaceship.
8. The coolest production still we saw was a new shot of Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Chewie in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon while at lightspeed.
9. "Very empowering" is how Gwendoline Christie described putting on her chrome armor this time around as Captain Phasma, which gets a shiny and sleek upgrade in this film.
10. Why did Del Toro enlist for duty in that galaxy far, far away? As the actor put it: "I saw the original 1977 one when I was ten, so when [the director] called me up and mentioned the title alone, I was like, 'Let's go.'"
"The Last Jedi" arrives in theaters December 15.