During the Star Wars Celebration sizzle reel for Rogue One, we got our first glimpse of two alien creatures from December’s Anthology movie, affectionately dubbed by fans as “Bigmouth” and “Space Monkey”, and now director Gareth Edwards has offered up some details on the two characters, who are actually called Pao and Bistan.
“There was this great design of this creature that’s mouth would open really wide, and he looked like he was really good at giving orders and shouting at people during a battle,” said Edwards with regards to “Bigmouth”, a.k.a. Pao. “I was like, ‘We’ve got to give him that moment in the film,’ and so [Pao] was born out of that.”
As for Bistan, he’s a gunner on a new gunship/troop transport vehicle, the U-Wing: “It’s not necessarily a character that we get to know, but I think he has a very memorable, iconic look. [He’s] one of my favorites. I can’t give away what happens to him.”
Edwards also spoke about the design process for the various creatures inhabiting the world of Rogue One, stating that: “It wasn’t like, ‘We’ve got this character, we need to design a creature for it, and here’s what this creature’s like.’ It was more like we told the creature department to come up with a thousand ideas, and then it was like casting the movie. There were walls and walls of these different types of characters that we could’ve picked from. We just went through them, like, ‘God, he’s fascinating…. Who’s that…? And she looks amazing…! And what’s that there?’ Slowly, we got it down to our top hundred, and then it got even more refined.”
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY, is the first film in the new standalone movies from Lucasfilm. It tells the story of how a group of unlikely heroes unite to undertake a daring and seemingly impossible mission to steal the plans for the Death Star.
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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is set for release on December 16th 2016, with a cast that includes Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Diego Luna (Milk), Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises), Donnie Yen (Ip Man), Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Alan Tudyk (Con Man), Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler), Genevieve O’Reilly (Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith) and Jonathan Aris (Sherlock).
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Originally published July 21, 2016. Updated November 29, 2022.
