Emilia Clarke is being a chatty Cathy on the press run for Solo: A Star Wars Story. In particular she’s slinging dirt at the productions she’s been in that didn’t work at all. You can guess which those are, I imagine. Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s run on Solo gets crapped on in her interview with Vanity Fair, and also the failed franchise reboot Terminator Genisys, which she admits happiness in seeing it bomb.
But let’s start with Solo,which she says was “saved” by Lucasfilm hiring Ron Howard to replace Lord and Miller. While others in the cast have done their best to deflect from the controversy that got them both fired, Clarke admits she saw it coming…
“When it comes to that amount of money, you’re almost waiting for that to happen. Money fucks us all up, doesn’t it? There’s so much pressure. Han Solo is a really beloved character. This is a really important movie for the franchise as a whole. It’s a shit ton of money. A shit ton of people. A shit ton of expectations.”
Clarke plays a new character in the Star Wars mythos, Qi’ra, an early figure from Han Solo’s past. As a new character, there’s no baseline personality to draw from, no previous incarnation of Qi’Ra to reference, and Clarke wasn’t getting help from Lord or Miller in figuring her out…
“I’m not gonna lie,” Clarke says. “I struggled with Qi’ra quite a lot. I was like: ‘Y’all need to stop telling me that she’s “film noir,” because that ain’t a note.’”
And then there’s Terminator Genisys, which premiered in 2015 as a reboot of the popular sci-fi franchise, with Clarke in the iconic role of Sarah Connor. It was a disaster that bombed at the box office and with audiences, but the warning signs were always there with reports of director Alan Taylor, who Clarked worked with frequently on Game of Thrones, struggling to keep things together. Apparently those stories were true…
Solo wasn’t the first troubled blockbuster to test Clarke’s resilience. If anything, the production of 2015’s Terminator Genisys was more chaotic. She watched frequent Thrones director Alan Taylor get “eaten and chewed up on Terminator. He was not the director I remembered. He didn’t have a good time. No one had a good time.” When the film underperformed at the box office, she was “relieved” to not have to return for any sequels. News of the rocky production traveled, and Clarke says the crew on the famously disastrous Fantastic Four, which was filming nearby, even had jackets made that read, AT LEAST WE’RE NOT ON TERMINATOR. “Just to give you a summary,” she says, laughing.
How bad must it have been for Clarke to be grateful at having a flop on her resume, a very high-profile flop that could have damaged her career? And damn, Alan Taylor! First Marvel stole Thor: The Dark World away from you in post-production and now this. Don’t be surprised if he never works on a major studio movie again.
