In een interview met Jamie Stangroom heeft acteur Tim Rose zijn onvrede geuit over het door hem vermeende gebrek aan respect dat hij kreeg tijdens de opnames van The Last Jedi.
Rose geeft aan enorm te hebben uitgekeken naar de terugkeer van Ackbar (een rol die hij in Return of the Jedi al speelde) in de sequels en hoopte op wat meer scenes dan in The Force Awakens. Tot zijn verbazing gebeurde er echter wat anders:
“So in The Last Jedi, I was quite looking forward to maybe them giving him something more juicy. We were only given the script on the day when we were shooting that piece of script, so each day I would come to work going, ‘Is today the day when Ackbar gets something a bit more involving?’ And I looked at my script and I went, ‘Oh, Ackbar’s going out of the window. Well, that’s that then!’”
Hij vervolgt:
“I wasn’t quite dead yet,” Rose said. “We finished all of our bit, and they asked me to come down to the camera. I thought, ‘Oh well, maybe they are going to say thank you for being one of the heritage characters and giving 30 years and all that,’ but what they did was, they gave me a Millennium Falcon sign that had the day and the date on it, the scene number, and they said, ‘Could you look into the camera and just say It’s a Wrap because that would be really funny.’ Ackbar looked into the camera and said, ‘It’s a wrap!’
“I was actually in tears in the suit after everything, after hoping there would be something, after knowing there wasn’t going to be anything else, Ackbar’s final moment before he went into the box was a big joke about it, ‘It’s a wrap,’ Rose said. “They just thought ‘wouldn’t that be funny’ and that was the sum total of my [laughter] life as Ackbar. Oh yeah, [it was quite emotional]. I disappeared down the back and couldn’t come out for a good 30 minutes after that.”
Een treurig afscheid van een bescheiden en aardige acteur die in Nederland tot driemaal toe te gast was op een ‘charity event’ en wiens personage meer dan drie decennia een rol speelde in vele Expanded Universe boeken en dus beduidend méér was dan “It’s a trap”.