Earlier this week, Badass Digest provided a leaked plot synopsis and a spoiler regarding John Boyega’s character in Star Wars: Episode VII. Go ahead and assume everything beyond this sentence is a spoiler, because we have a new rumor about the character Gwendoline Christie is playing.
We’ve already heard John Boyega is playing an AWOL stormtrooper, and now Badass Digest reports Gwendoline Christie is playing Boyega’s commanding officer who is hunting him down. They say her character may be an Imperial officer, and Christie has been seen training with a lightsaber. Which means she may actually be a Sith. This would jibe with another rumor we’ll get to in a moment.
After the uproar about there being so few women in that Star Wars: Episode VII cast photo released April 29th, a source told Badass Digest a character who had been written as male/neutral was being gender-swapped. (I’ll resist going on a rant about how uncool it is that neutral characters nearly always default to male.) After the source made that claim, Lupita Nyong’o and Gwendoline Christie were cast in early June, making this galaxy far far away a bit less of a sausage party.
Now let’s get back to that Sith rumor. Last September, Benedict Cumberbatch was rumored to be in contention for the role of a villain, “almost certainly a Sith”, who would appear in multiple movies. Badass Digest thinks that role is the one which was gender swapped, although it’s worth noting the character is from an earlier draft of the script which was rewritten, so that Sith may have been 86’d.
If it turns out Gwendoline Christie really is going to be wielding a lightsaber as Brienne of Sith in Episode VII, we don’t even have to imagine what that would look like. We already know…
Via Badass Digest, Rose Papillon, and Hey U Guys