Woody Harrelson Says Han Solo Might be Best Star Wars Film Ever
Woody Harrelson is probably one of the few actors who can go ahead and boast, only a month into production, that the Star Wars spinoff he’s working on will be the best film in the entire franchise. The man’s a treasure, after all. No matter what project he gets involved in, whether its playing Katniss Everdeen’s mentor Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games, or surly detective Marty Hart in HBO’s True Detective, Woody rules. So when he tells Collider that the Han Solo anthology film he’s might just be the best, you can’t help but think, if Woody says so, it might just be so.
Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie), the Han Solo film has assembled a seriously stellar cast, with Woody playing Han’s (Alden Ehrenreich) criminal mentor, Garris Shrike. In his Collider interview, Woody praised his co-directors, and then added a little bit more:
“They’re great. You know, any movie’s only as good as the director or in this case directors, and so I have a suspicion, because if you look at the whole, all the movies, the backlog of every one of these movies, there’s a lot of great stuff, but one might not be not as good with the writing in this or the acting in that or the directing in that, this has great actors, great directors, great script, and I really feel like we’re gonna make the best one.”
Hard to argue with Harrelson’s math here. The Han Solo film is basically a who’s who of up and coming actors and below-the-line talent. Along with those very talented co-directors, it’s a big deal that their cinematographer is Arrival’s visionary Bradford Young, one of the most promising DPs working in Hollywood today. The cast, which along with Harrelson and Ehrenreich includes Atlanta’s Donald Glover (as the young Lando Calrissian), Game of Thrones Emilia Clarke, the soon-to-be-a-star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Westworld’s Thandie Newton and The Wire’s Michael K. Williams is fantastic. And then there’s the material—following the adventures of a young Han Solo, when he was just learning how to be a proper scoundrel and long before he met a certain young Jedi and his princess sister—the possibilities here are endless.
If anyone else had made the boast, say, the film’s star, or one of the co-directors, or Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, you might have winced a bit. (Kennedy would never choose one Star Wars film over another, of course). But with Harrelson suggesting it, you can’t help but think, Man, he might be right!
You can next see Harrelson in War for Planet of the Apes, which comes out July 14. The Han Solo film debuts on May 25, 2018.
Featured image: left to right: There’s Woody Harrelson, who plays Han’s smuggling mentor, co-director Phil Lord (directly in front of him), Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who we hear is playing a droid, Alden Ehrenreich (playing Han, of course), Emilia Clarke (her role is still a secret), Joonas Suotamo (as Chewie), co-director Christopher Miller and Donald Glover, who is playing Lando Calrissian. Thandie Newton is not pictured.
