Riz Ahmed’s Rogue One Audition Tapes Revealed + The Initial Plan for Bodhi Rook In the Film
Entertainment Weekly shared their 4th report yesterday, promoting the Rogue One Digital HD release, focusing on Riz Ahmed’s character Bodhi Rook. Also ET Online shared a never before seen footage with Ahmed’s now famous audition tapes for Rogue One. Check them out.
In their new report EW reveals that the initial plan was Riz Ahmed to play a crazy engineer named Bokan, who was imprisoned. When Ahmed joined the cast he didn’t know that he will end up playing a completely different character. Ahmed explains:
“His name was Bokan, and he was actually Saw Gerrera’s engineer, living on a planet with a strong electromagnetic field, which meant that electronics were never working. 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.”
Writer Gary Whitta revealed another change of the plot so that the Rebels could end up on an Imperial Shuttle with which to reach the end of their journey on Scarif.
“We knew we needed to ditch the U-Wing and get them on that Imperial shuttle that they used at the end. In the finished film, you see that scene happen on Eadu. Before that evolution in the story, the Rebels crash-landed amid the electrical storms of Gerrera’s moon. When they try to land, there’s a ship graveyard, and that’s part of the reason the Empire’s never found [Gerrera]. Saw has modified his ships to survive in that environment but nothing else can land.”
Ahmed also spoke about the infamous Rogue One reshoots, revealing a different development of his final sequence that was not used in the final cut.
“Actually he died slightly differently before, in that whole sequence of him running around with the plug. There was actually this one shot that was about a minute long, and it was basically Bodhi ducking and diving from Stormtroopers to try and like get the plug to where he wanted it to go while Donnie and Jyn, when Chirrut and Baze were kind of flanking him.
Every time he’d get sprung by a Stormtrooper, Donnie would come out and Bang! then they would go down, and then Bodhi would have to crawl and jump over somebody, just to be caught again.Then Chirrut would pop up. It was almost, kind of an extended slapstick comedy sequence.
When he was running into the ship, he was shot and badly injured. He has to crawl his way back onto the ship, and it was quite extended.”It still ended with the same moment of triumph, followed by his demise in an explosion, but Ahmed says he’s glad they reshot that sequence.
EW revealed even more interesting details about Ahmed’s character. For the full story, make sure to check their site.
Also ET Online has an exclusive look at Riz Ahmed’s Rogue One audition tapes:
Founder of SWNN, MNN and The Cantina forums.
Born on April 24, 1980.
many Bokans died during re-shoots
To be fair, I don’t think they ever shot anything with “Bokan”. They had already re-written him by then.
yeah it didn’t seem right when I read ”re-writes” to myself you cant die from that. though you can get re-shot several times lol
I wish Bodhi had a bit more character development in the movie. I really liked that character considering how little attention he got. Ahmed deserves a lot of credit for that.
I agree. His character was better in the novelization, as you get a lot of his inner thoughts and aspirations.
I agree. I haven’t finished the novelization yet but there is a lot more information there.
I just couldnt get over him wearing safety goggles half the movie
I like this backstory and his name better. He sort of came off as a slightly less goofy Finn in the final product.