Star Wars Celebration brings balance to the fandom


The Force awakened in Anaheim last weekend as an estimated 60,000 fans descended on the Anaheim Convention Center for the 10th annual Star Wars Celebration, a four-day event dedicated solely to those who take their milk blue and their nerf herders scruffy-looking.

The event kicked off in epic fashion with the premiere of a rapturously received trailer for this December’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh installment in the saga of the Skywalkers and the first to be released following Disney’s acquisition of the beloved property back in 2012. Director J.J. Abrams and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy were on hand to introduce the new footage, tease fans with tantalizing tidbits regarding planet names — turns out the desert shown in the trailer isn’t Tattooine but rather a brand new world called Jakku — and provide early glimpses of the film’s cast, including series vets Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Harrison Ford (Han Solo) and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), as well as a new trio of heroes played by ingénue Daisy Ridley, British up-and-comer John Boyega and Golden Globe nominee Oscar Isaac.

With the notable exception of Ford, who is still recovering from last month’s plane crash involving an emergency-landing on a Venice golf course, nearly all of the film’s stars joined Abrams and Kennedy on the Celebration Stage, flanked somewhat ominously by a garrison of sleekly redesigned stormtroopers. In addition to the warm reception from the faithful, some of whom had camped out the night before to ensure their seats, the actors were also surprised by two of their non-human cast mates: the plucky R2-D2 and the newly unveiled orange and white “ball droid” BB-8. Much to the crowd’s delight, the latter was revealed to be a working prop instead of the digital creation many assumed it was.

After heartfelt and nostalgia-tinged words from Hamill and the rest of the old guard, the younger stars each received an opportunity to speak about their time on the Force Awakens set while offering often cryptic information about their respective characters. Ridley, who has never before acted in a major film, mentioned that her character, Rey, first appears on Jakku, leading a life of what could be described as quiet desperation.

“She’s a scavenger in a ship graveyard and very self-sufficient, very solitary,” the 23-year-old actress said. “Until she meets another character and the adventure begins.”

Boyega, who rocketed to international prominence after starring as a charismatic South London street tough in Joe Cornish’s deliriously entertaining 2011 alien invasion flick Attack the Block, revealed that his character, Finn, is an Imperial stormtrooper who undergoes a crisis of conscience, an intriguing concept the previous six films never touched on.

“When we find Finn, he’s in incredible danger and he reacts to the changes in his life,” Boyega said. “And it launches him into the Star Wars universe.”

Isaac, a gifted performer who has received critical accolades for his turns as a struggling folk singer in the Coen brothers’ languorous dirge Inside Llewyn Davis and a morally besieged fuel supplier in J.C. Chandor’s anti-gangster movie A Most Violent Year, recalled celebrating in his hotel room after hearing he’d won the part of Poe Dameron, a seasoned X-Wing ace the actor describes as, “the best frickin’ pilot in the galaxy,” adding that Dameron will find himself on a mission from a certain princess with a fondness for hair buns.

The rest of the expo, which ran from Thursday to Sunday, included everything from a Lego X-Wing Shop and custom droid racing to a Princess Leia-centric fashion show and a Star Wars-themed tattoo contest, but the two biggest draws by far were the Force Awakens prop and costume gallery — the line to get in exceeded two hours at one point — and a series of panels hosted by voice actor James Arnold Taylor. Taylor, best known for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi for over six seasons on Cartoon Network’s The Clone Wars, used the interviews as a platform to promote his one-man show “Talking to Myself,” a journey through the tumultuous world of professional voice-over that involves him employing over 200 unique voices.

Taylor’s guests included Hamill, Fisher, Daniels and Ian McDiarmid, the stately British stage actor responsible for breathing foul life into the iconic arch-villain Emperor Palpatine, the Faustian Sith lord who brought an entire galaxy to its knees by transforming the courageous Anakin Skywalker into the tyrannical Darth Vader and the Old Republic into the First Galactic Empire. The highlight of the McDiarmid interview was undoubtedly the segment where Taylor asked his distinguished guest to read a passage in-character from William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return, the third installment of the immensely clever book series that re-imagines the Star Wars saga as Elizabethan stage plays written entirely in era-appropriate iambic pentameter. The result was riveting, hilarious and at times utterly terrifying. It’s also a perfect example of the type of inspired weirdness one can only find at fan conventions.