Remember those Star Wars: Episode VII open casting calls taking place in 11 different cities in the US and the UK? Our own Josh Kurp attended one of them and let us know it boiled down to a whole lot of waiting in line just to be told to visit a website. The roles Disney was pretending would be open to amateurs were Rachel and Thomas. Rachel is an ambitious, 17-year-old, street smart orphan “using humor and guts to get by”. Thomas is a smart, fatherless guy in his late teens or early twenties who “understands you can’t take life too seriously”.
Now an official press release announces two actors have been cast out of the 37,000 people who attended casting calls and 30,000 who submitted videos. If you think I’m going to pull out a calculator and do the math about that, I’m going to have to remind you to NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS.
Crystal Clarke is an American actress studying in Glasgow, UK, who has both stage and screen acting experience and is soon to be seen in her first feature, The Moon and the Sun (to be released in 2015). British actor Pip Andersen is a skilled practitioner of parkour, a discipline that involves propelling oneself through any given environment with incredible grace and agility. Pip recently demonstrated this remarkable skill in a Spider-Man ad for Sony.
In other words, yet another “open” casting call ends with only working actors getting the roles. And one of them is named “Pip” and does parkour. Because everything needs to have parkour now, and — if we’re not mistaken — all productions filmed in the UK must include at least one bloke named Pip, by order of the King Pip VII, who totally existed. Trust me, I went to public school in America.
The press release also included an update denying those rumored delays:
In August, the team will take a brief two-week hiatus while adjustments to the current production schedule are made as actor Harrison Ford recovers from a leg injury. Harrison is doing well and is looking forward to returning to the set soon. Shooting remains on track to wrap in the fall with the film scheduled for release on December 18, 2015.
Here’s another amazing reveal. We have an EXCLUSIVE behind the scenes video of Pip Anderson filming a scene. Or, conversely, this is a behind the scenes video of how Harrison Ford hurt his leg, depending on how morbid you prefer your jokes to be.