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Does 'Star Wars' casting call hint at DEATH of LUKE SKYWALKER?

Disney scours UK for 'athletic' teenagers with dead parent issues

An open casting call for "lead roles in a Disney film" is rumoured to be the search for unknowns to lead the new Star Wars movies.

Star Wars: The Complete Saga

Disney is holding open auditions for an unnamed film in the UK and Ireland over the next couple of weeks looking for a male and female lead, according to @UKopencall.

The Mickey Mouse studio is naturally not giving too much away about the film, but the BBC is claiming that the roles are for the next Star Wars movie.

As described in the casting call, "Rachel" and "Thomas" - it'd be a bit of a giveaway if the listed names were Star Wars-esque - are two beautiful young things with parental issues. Rachel, who "must be beautiful, smart and athletic" will be played by someone over 16 and will be 17 years old in the film, while Thomas, who has to be over 18, will be a 19 to 23 year old young man who just happens to be handsome, smart and athletic.

Aside from their youth and beauty, the notes on the characters do give away some details about the film. Rachel is an orphan who has been "forced to make her way in a tough, dangerous town" from a young age. She will be "street smart" and use "humour and guts to get by".

Thomas will have grown up "without a father's influence" and will be able to "appreciate the absurdities in life and understand you can't take life too seriously".

All these dead/missing parents don't bode too well for older characters in the series like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. If director JJ Abrams is planning on any kind of familial links to the previous films, they may only get to show up in flashbacks or as misty Jedi ghosts from the beyond.

However, many fans will be relieved that the kids in the film will at least be teenagers, skipping that whole pre-pubescent phase that can swerve from cute to gratingly annoying so very, very easily.

The film's quest for beautiful young things will take it to Bristol, London, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin, where casting directors will be doing "meet and greets" to try to find the faces of the next batch of Star Wars films.

This is far from the only time that major roles have been cast in open auditions, particularly children's roles. Two of the Harry Potter trio, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, were picked in a similar way while Abrams' previous kid-centric movie Super 8 also held open casting calls in the US. ®

Bootnote

Vulture Central's backroom gremlins spotted a video doing the rounds that showed Jar Jar Binks being bumped off in a supposedly deleted scene from Star Wars Episode I.

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