Rogue One: A Star Wars Story's Mads Mikkelsen, who played Galen Erso, downplayed what's long been considered a series of extreme reshoots.
"Some of it was a little chaotic," Mikkelsen said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. "There was no secret that there was some rewriting in the script while we were doing it. And when you do that … it is obviously very tricky for the actors to know ‘What am I carrying into this room now? I opened the door. I’m not back to what happened before.’ So there was some of that. Having said that, it always felt like a solid story. A young girl lost, [who] doesn’t know where she belongs in the world. Then an Oppenheimer story unfolds. She’s always heard [her father Galen] was this, and then she realizes he was that. And it was quite beautifully written. At the end of the day, the changes that were in the film were not as dramatic as people talk about. It was tweaks, but obviously, if you do it while you’re working it can be confusing."
Rogue One was the first of the short-lived Star Wars anthology films. Helmed by Gareth Edwards, Lucasfilm wound up bringing in Tony Gilroy to helm what was believed to be extensive reshoots. Gilroy himself lent credence to this notion in 2018, saying, "If you look at Rogue, all the difficulty with Rogue, all the confusion of it... and all the mess, and in the end when you get in there, it's actually very, very simple to solve. Because you sort of go, 'Oh this is a movie where, folks, just look—everyone is going to die.' So it's a movie about sacrifice... It's all a question about why are all these people going to sacrifice [themselves] and you need to motivate them with a purity throughout the way, and every scene in the movie has to be about the movie."
A story set apart from the classic installments of the Star Wars saga, Rogue One brings a unique perspective to the galaxy far, far away. Directed by Gareth Edwards, the film tells of Rebel soldier Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and her band of fighters who attempt to discover a secret to the Death Star's destruction.
Directed by Gareth Edwards, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, Jiang Wen and Forest Whitaker.
Source: Happy Sad Confused, via Heroic Hollywood