20 pieces of trivia you need to know about Star Wars

Poe Dameron is named after a bear

What’s in a name? A handsome pilot by any other name would look as sweet.

We don’t love Poe Dameron because of his name, but it does help. It helps that there’s a good hard consonant sound at the start of his surname, for instance, because how else would we show our deep, enduring love for him without emphasizing that part of his name?

Poe takes his name from JJ Abrams’ assistant, Morgan Dameron, and his daughter’s stuffed polar bear, Poe (though he says he wasn’t aware of the latter’s influence at the time).

“I was doing some proof-reading for J.J. and I saw my name and thought it was just a placeholder,” Dameron told Empire. “I went into Larry (Kasdan) and J.J. and asked them about it and they said Poe Dameron is the name in the movie. They said ‘Dameron’ was a very Star Wars name. It’s very surreal to see our family name on all the toys and merchandise. My mom bought a 12″ figure and it has pride of place on a table in the living room. Whenever I see Oscar Isaac [who plays him], it’s like, ‘Hey Dameron.’ ‘Oh, hey Dameron.’”

In canon, Poe’s father, Kes, was a footsoldier for the Rebellion and fought in the Battle of Endor, while his mother, Shara Bey, was a pilot, so battling the Empire has always been in Poe’s blood.

Much in the same way as Star Wars has been for Isaac.

In fact, Poe’s home planet is Yavin 4 precisely because Isaac was born in Guatemala, where the medal ceremony scene at the end of A New Hope was shot. Isaac told Seth Meyers that he even dressed up as a GNK droid for a trip to see Return of the Jedi when he was younger and his uncle, a huge fan of the franchise, was invited to the Force Awakens set, and got to appear in the beginning of the movie as one of the villagers on Jakku.