John Boyega Claims Lucasfilm Has Been More Supportive of Their Actors Following His Experience With the Sequel Trilogy
John Boyega has stated that Lucasfilm has been supportive of his career after he raised some concerns to the company.
Getting a major role in Star Wars was a dream for Boyega, but as soon as the first trailer for The Force Awakens dropped, the actor became a target of racist online trolling campaigns that the company didn’t know how to deal with. Boyega temporarily left social media due to how he was treated online to focus on his role in the franchise and other acting opportunities. While this hate subsided over time, Boyega felt that his character was sidelined in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker after being the co-lead for his first film, with Kelly Marie Tran facing similar abuse and a subsequent decrease in prominence. In 2020, he vented his frustrations in an interview with GQ:
“What I would say to Disney is do not bring out a [person of color], market them to be much more important in the franchise than they are and then have them pushed to the side… Like, you guys knew what to do with Daisy Ridley, you knew what to do with Adam Driver. You knew what to do with these other people, but when it came to Kelly Marie Tran, when it came to John Boyega, you know f*** all… They gave all the nuance to Adam Driver, all the nuance to Daisy Ridley. Let’s be honest. Daisy knows this. Adam knows this. Everybody knows. I’m not exposing anything.”
Following this interview, Boyega was contacted by Lucasfilm, who asked to hold a meeting for him to address his concerns. Apparently the meeting went well, as Boyega has talked more positively about his experience with Lucasfilm since then. Talking to Men’s Health, he explained that the concerns that he spoke about with Lucasfilm were used to help protect Moses Ingram when she was met with similar backlash in her role in Obi-Wan Kenobi, also noting that the advice he had has been heeded:
“I’m the one that brought this to the freaking forefront! …At least the people going into it now, after my time, [they’re] cool. [Lucasfilm] is going to make sure you’re well supported and at least you [now] go through this franchise knowing that everybody is going to have [your] back. I’m glad I talked out everything at that time.”
At this time, Boyega is not currently signed on to do any future Star Wars content – in part due to a lack of animated and live-action sequel-era content being produced since the trilogy ended – although he has stated that he is open to the idea of a return if he got to act off of several of his co-stars and worked with familiar faces behind the scenes. In any case, Lucasfilm standing up for Ingram felt like a breath of fresh air, with this hopefully being the standard for how the company handles dealing with harassment going forward.
Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.
