Felicity Jones on Jyn Erso in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

August 13, 2016

Felicity Jones has revealed more details about her character Jyn Erso in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

“She is absolutely a very unlikely heroine,” the actress says of Jyn Erso. “She’s someone on the edges and fringes of society. Physically, she’s smaller than everyone else around her, but… when someone has something they believe in, that’s what powers them, that’s what motivates them, that’s what can give someone enormous strength.”

Director Gareth Edwards added that he chose Jones because she wasn’t “so kick-ass and shields-up that the audience couldn’t empathize with her. There were a lot of people who could learn how to fight and beat people up and do the physical side of it. For me, the most interesting thing is when there’s a crack in the armor, when you can glimpse the vulnerability in someone. You can just hang the camera on Felicity and not say a word, and you can feel her having a million different thoughts. You get interested in what she’s thinking and what’s going on. She can be very observant within a scene. It doesn’t always have to be about her directly, but we’re experiencing it through her. She just has that knack for pulling you in.”

Jyn Erso’s hero in the movie is Mon Mothma (played by Genevieve O’Reilly). “Mon Mothma is ultimately, for Jyn, someone she looks up to,” Jones says. “So even as the film opens [Jyn] has a very strong female role model in front of her, and someone she respects.”

Rogue One tells the story of resistance fighters who have united to steal plans to the dreaded Death Star. Felicity Jones leads the cast as Jyn Erso alongside Mads Mikklesen who plays her father, Galen Erso. Diego Luna (Milk) stars as Captain Cassian Andor with Donnie Yen (Ip Man, Blade II) as the blind spiritual warrior Chirrut Imwe, Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly, Devils on the Doorstep) as his heavily armored best friend Baze Malbus,, Alan Tudyk (Firefly) as the droid K-2SO, Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, Four Lions) as the Rebel pilot Bodhi Rook, plus Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) as Saw Gerrera, a character first introduced in Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline, Mississippi Grind) as the film’s main antagonist, Director Orson Krennic.