Star Wars: Solo's L3-37 is 'Self-Made,' Has No Owner

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Star Wars: Solo’s L3-37 Built Herself from the Scraps of Other Droids

By Brandon Staley

Published Feb 9, 2018

The cast of Solo: A Star Wars Story has revealed that Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s L3-37 is a “self-made” droid without an owner.

Some new details have emerged over the past few days regarding one of Solo: A Star Wars Story’s strangest characters -- L3-37, the droid that’s set to be voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Chief among those revelations is that L3-37 is a self-built droid made from the remains of other droids, meaning that she’s kind of like the Frankenstein’s monster of highly-advanced robots. That hodgepodge approach apparently suits Donald Glover’s Lando Calrissian, though, as the droid acts as his partner in the upcoming Star Wars side story.

“I think they’re both kind of self-made,” Glover said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “And they get each other in that way.”

If parts of L3-37 look familiar, that’s because they are. According to Jon Kasdan, who wrote the script for Solo with his father, Lawrence Kasdan, L3-37 is owned by no one, having cobbled together her various parts from different droids throughout the years -- her head looks like the top half of a BB-8 droid and her body is more than a little reminiscent of an Astromech unit, for example.

“She’s a self-modified droid,” Jon Kasdan said. “The idea is that she’s sort of a mutt, if you will, of various parts of different kinds of droids who has improved upon herself.”

A cobbled-together droid without an owner will certainly be a departure for fans of the Star Wars films, which have largely separated droids into various categories like Assassin, Astromech and Protocol, among many others, most of which are delineated into a sole purpose and are property of an owner – if not a faction to which they are allied.

While the series established that droids can be bought and sold early on in A New Hope, it has never fully addressed the fact that droids are incredibly complicated beings that, for all intents and purposes, appear sentient. It seems like Solo will be pushing this narrative even further by introducing a droid who doesn’t just stand on her own, but does so because she built herself up to do just that.

Debuting in theaters on May 25, Solo: A Star Wars Story is directed by Ron Howard and stars Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, Woody Harrelson as Tobias Beckett, Emilia Clarke as Qi'ra, Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian, Thandie Newton as Val, Phoebe Waller-Bridge as L3-37, Joonas Suotamo as Chewbacca, Paul Bettany as Dryden Vos and Harley Durst as Moloch.