The Last Jedi: 15 things we know about the new Star Wars movie
6. Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo — friend or foe?
When Laura Dern’s character portrait by Annie Leibovitz was released, the whole fandom gasped. At least that’s what we like to imagine, because with purple hair and incredible cowl game, a new Star Wars icon was born.
Dern will be playing Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo, a Resistance leader who looks likely to lock horns with Poe and Leia. Admiral Holdo featured on Entertainment Weekly’s cover, under the headline “Can Poe get along with his new boss?”, meaning that somewhere along the line she is going to expect him to fall in line with her plans and that he is not going to like it.
As EW also notes, the Resistance’s victory at the end of The Force Awakens came at a high price (a moment of silence for everyone on Hosnian Prime). Even the Resistance isn’t immune to bureaucracy and EW implies that Admiral Holdo will swoop in to do things differently, much to the chagrin of Poe.
He distrusts her because she lacks the humility Leia has. His loyalty to Leia puts him at odds with Holdo but EW points out that Holdo is perhaps not the antagonist Poe thinks she is — she learned her trade from the General too.
Vanity Fair acknowledges that Holdo is likely to be a bit weird, whatever side she’s on. A bit of backstory between her and Leia was introduced in Claudia Gray’s novel, Leia: Princess of Alderaan.
The article points to Gray’s interview with StarWars.com in which she says, “[Holdo is] somebody who’s a bit off-kilter, who sees the world through a prism most others don’t understand. At first Leia thinks she’s pleasant but weird, but as time goes on, it becomes apparent that there’s much more to Holdo than you might guess when you first met her. We don’t really have a lot of true oddballs in Star Wars, so it was fun to introduce one!”
We certainly know more about Holdo than we do about the other new character in the series, DJ, played by Benicio Del Toro. EW has the lowdown but this amounts to mainly his job, which is a dodgy code-breaker, or “slicer”. He doesn’t fight for a side.
EW also revealed that DJ is going to be part of Rose and Finn’s mission to Canto Bight but in what capacity remains unclear. We’re going to assume this is for a reason, especially given Del Toro’s absence from the trailers. This is one sleeping bantha we’re not going to poke for now.