Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s latest cameo: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s director Rian Johnson has announced a cameo from longtime collaborator and friend Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
In all big time connected movie universes like Star Wars, Marvel comics or Finding Nemo, Easter eggs filled with nougaty cameos abound. It’s always Easter egg season, and so Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson dropped an egg at a press tour stop in Japan.
Johnson said his “very good friend” Gordon-Levitt will be “the voice of an alien in the film.”
It’s always egg time, not just when you’re in the movie theater, perching under the shade of a plot to reach down and concentrate on a suspiciously familiar voice or face. Seeing and cracking open the egg is enjoyable. But the real point of the Easter egg, of announcing it before (or way before) the movie is out, is for the fun of the search.
Conjecture on how Gordon-Levitt, or Princes William and Harry or Tom Hardy, fit in the movie will now unfurl in every direction, giving fans fun fodder with which to predict and argue and anticipate. You can speculate about things that have nothing to do with the movie narrative, too, like the relationships of the people — gauging Q-rating, business and public relation incentive — that make for the cameo. A little announcement about a little cameo can crack open speculation about anything, really (like, maybe, this news being tipped as a way to distract from the firing of Collin Trevorrow and the franchise’s trouble with keeping directors).
And, best or most paradoxical — or both — of all is that, when Gordon-Levitt’s voice does ring out, people can approve or disapprove, laugh at their guesses and enjoy the wink and buddy high-five between Gordon-Levitt and Johnson. Also, people will be waiting for it. Its arrival will be a payoff.
Movie makers and execs, like Star Wars‘ Kathleen Kennedy, keep the good egg vibes going after the movie by making sure there are also a few cameo surprises. The delightful shock gives people something to react to for a bit while also filling fans with an ongoing sleuth like suspicion of the next surprise, doing their damnedest to try to figure it out.
And, voila, movie-promotion-magic that everyone enjoys.
Johnson previously directed Gordon-Levitt as the lead in his movies Brick and, most previously, Looper. Gordon-Levitt also played a small, uncredited role in Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom.
Next: J.J. Abrams will take over Episode IX
Johnson also found small cameos for his sister, sweeping in Brick and Bloom, and his father, as a fruit salesmen in Bloom. He likes this stuff, keeping the people close to him around when he does big projects.
Stay tuned, Star Wars faithful, there will probably be more cameo announcements to come (and probably a bunch more as surprises in the movie).