Donald Glover Is on Board for Pansexual Lando in Star Wars Movies
Solo: A Star Wars Story isn’t even out yet (though there are only days left to wait), and we’ve already learned a lot about one of the film’s main characters: Lando Calrissian. Not only did we get strung along by a bad interview translation that promised he was getting his own movie next, only to have it turn out that such a movie is just something that’s under consideration, but we’ve heard talk from one of the movie’s writers about his pansexuality—including the unfortunate detail that it’s not really made explicit in Solo.
That’s why we had mixed emotions about Jonathan Kasdan—son of longtime Star Wars writer Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote for Lando’s very first appearance way back in The Empire Strikes Back—confirming that Lando is meant to be pansexual. In basically the same breath, he also confirmed that won’t quite explicitly be the case in Solo, although judging by the video above, it was certainly the way Donald Glover played the character and his smooth flirtatiousness. Kasdan said that he “would have loved to have gotten a more explicitly LGBT character into this movie,” but ultimately he didn’t, which is a story we’ve heard many times before.
Although, the writer adding that extra-textual detail before we’ve even experienced the piece of fiction is certainly a fresh twist. We’re definitely more used to hearing about it after the fact, with the example that most readily comes to mind being J.K. Rowling adding the detail, outside of what she actually wrote, that Dumbledore is gay, once she was done writing the Harry Potter books.
We’ve also been waiting to see whether Poe Dameron’s obvious chemistry with Finn would ever be allowed to go anywhere in the sequel trilogy of movies, which everyone involved is very aware of by now. So, it’s hard not to feel like we’re going to keep hearing, “We would have really liked to, but we couldn’t,” with no real justification as to why not.
Donald Glover himself clearly can’t figure out that justification either, with the logic that it wouldn’t really even make sense to limit oneself when there’s so much love to go around in space and so many options that choosing just one (or any finite number) seems boring. Maybe someday that logic will eventually manifest itself in a more meaningful way, on the big screen, than the hints and innuendo that people have had to rely on for representation for way too long.
(via Uproxx, image: screengrab)
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