Kingsman actor Taron Egerton has been reflecting on why he walked away from the chance to play Han Solo in the 2018 film.
Taron Egerton has been in quite a revealing mood of late, speaking recently about chats he’s had with Marvel Studios about playing the role of Wolverine in their planned X-Men movie, not to mention discussing why he turned down the role of Cyclops in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse. The actor has continued to chat about projects that could have been, telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he also dropped out of the running to pay a young Han Solo in what would ultimately become 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
According to Egerton, he’d got to the point when he was down to the last five in the casting process and was filming screen tests, when he realised that the project simply wasn’t right for him. As he puts it: “I’ll be honest, I got on the Falcon. I was with Chewie. I was in the full costume. I felt like I got there, I did it, I lived it. It just felt to me like I didn’t feel… like you know when we mentioned earlier, that thing when I read the Kingsman script and I was like, ‘This is… I’ve gotta do this. This is my part’. [With Solo], I just didn’t feel it.”
Whatever ‘it’ was that Egerton wasn’t feeling, it was missing from much of the film, with Solo being a project that switched directors mid-shoot and released to an underwhelming response from audiences. Egerton would go on to make Rocketman, the Elton John biopic which would push his star further into the ascendancy. One part of the team behind Solo who would like to see more of the franchise though, is writer Lawrence Kasdan. The veteran writer and director spoke recently about reviving Solo in the form of a sequel, rather than a TV series, saying:
“No, there’s not any talk of [a TV adaptation]. I’ve never been particularly drawn to expanding [Solo] into a show. But, I do talk to Jon [Kasdan] and Ron [Howard] a lot about what went right and what went wrong with the Solo experience. I would be more interested in doing another movie, not a TV series.”
Outside of that core creative team of writers and director, we doubt there’s much of an appetite for a return to the world of Solo, with news of the proposed Lando spin-off, featuring Donald Glover’s take on the character, being especially scarce of late. Whilst it’s interesting to hear the rather polarised take from two people involved with the project, we doubt we’ll be seeing a return to the world of Solo anytime soon.
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