Admiral Ackbar met his end in Rian Johnson's Star Wars: Episode IX - The Last Jedi when a First Order attack took his life. The death was somewhat controversial, and puppeteer Tim Rose has expressed his disappointment with how Ackbar died and what happened afterwards.
In an interview with Jamie Stangroom, Rose was asked if he was disappointed with his exit. He replied, "Yeah, very much so. After The Force Awakens -- for whatever reason, length of picture, whatever -- it all got cut out. So after waiting 30 years to reprise Ackbar I was a little disappointed with Ackbar's role in that picture."
"So in The Last Jedi, I was quite looking forward to maybe them giving him something more juicy," he continued. "We were only given the script on the day when we were shooting that piece of script, so each day I would come to work going, ‘Is today the day when Ackbar gets something a bit more involving?’ And I looked at my script and I went, ‘Oh, Ackbar's going out of the window. Well, that's that then!’ I wasn’t quite dead yet."
Rose also revealed how he was unhappy with what happened afterwards, saying, "We finished all of our bits and they asked me to come down to camera. And I thought, ‘Oh well, maybe they’re going to say thank you for being one of the heritage characters and giving 30 years and all that.’ But what they did was, they gave me a Millennium Falcon sign that had the day and the date on it, the scene number, and they said, ‘Can you look at camera and say 'It's a wrap?' Because that would be really funny.’ … I was actually in tears in the suit because I thought - after everything, after hoping there’d be something, after knowing there wasn't going to be anything else, Ackbar's final moment before he went in to the box was a big joke about ‘It's a wrap.’ They just thought ‘Wouldn’t it be funny?’ And that was the sum total of my life as Ackbar."
He then explained it was an emotional moment for him, and that he couldn't come out of the back area for around thirty minutes.
Ackbar's final scene was captured for one of the film's sizzle reels.
Directed and co-written by J.J. Abrams, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker stars Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Kelly Marie Tran, Joonas Suotamo, Billie Lourd, Keri Russell, Anthony Daniels, Mark Hamill, Billy Dee Williams and Carrie Fisher, with Naomi Ackie and Richard E. Grant. The film arrives December 20.
(via CinemaBlend)