Jennifer Beals didn't know she was in The Book Of Boba Fett, just that it was a Star Wars thing
Despite playing an alien with tentacles coming out of her head, Jennifer Beals didn't feel the need to push for too many details on The Book Of Boba Fett
Disney’s dedication to secrecy is famous at this point, with Mickey Mouse tightly controlling any and all information that comes out about his stuff and Marvel and Star Wars (and probably National Geographic, but it doesn’t come up as often). Actors being unable to talk about the Disney thing they’re working on as extremely common, but it’s less common to hear about an actor who doesn’t even know what the thing they’re working on is—and not in a Gwyneth Paltrow way where the actor just does so many Marvel things that they don’t really care.
That’s apparently what happened to The L Word’s Jennifer Beals, though. She popped up recently in the trailer for The Book Of Boba Fett as a Twi’lek (one of those aliens with the head-tentacles that Jabba The Hutt would have dancing around). Beals knew she was in a Star Wars, certainly, but in a conversation with Variety, she revealed that she didn’t actually know what the Star Wars thing was.
“Even when I first stepped onto the set,” she told Variety, inadvertently setting up a rhyme, “I didn’t realize I was in The Book of Boba Fett. I just knew that I was getting to be part of this story.” Beals says she “knew about the character,” so it’s not like director Robert Rodriguez just said “put on this head-tentacles and be in a Star Wars,” but it’s still surprising to hear that she was willing to do that without really needing to know what she was putting on head-tentacles for. (Variety’s Adam B. Vary points out that they’re called “lekku,” which we did know, but he deserves credit for also knowing it.)
Beyond that, Beals is, unsurprisingly, unable to share too many other details about her Book Of Boba Fett character. She pointedly did not answer a question about whether or not her character is related in any way to fellow Twi’lek Bib Fortuna—the former Jabba lackey who got merc’d by Boba Fett and Fennec Shand in the end of season two of The Mandalorian—but she did acknowledge that her character appears to be better off than most Twi’leks shown in Star Wars.
We’ll know more about what’s going on when Book Of Boba Fett premieres on Disney+ on December 29, and if you’d like to know more about this Boba Fett guy, we’ve got you covered.