J.J. Abrams and the rest of the team behind Star Wars: The Force Awakens almost cheated us out of the Poe Dameron/Finn bromance (and all the memes it later sparked). That means this scene almost didn’t happen.
When Oscar Isaac first got the script for Star Wars, his character didn’t make it all the way to the end. “Originally, Poe was going to die early in the film, and that was the script Oscar saw,” Abrams said in a documentary clip shared by iO9. “And one of his issues, wanting to do this movie was that he’d made like four movies in which he died early on. And he was sick of dying early on.”
A week after Isaac saw the script, J.J. announced that he’d reworked the script to save Poe’s character. And though J.J. wanted to help Isaac out, the fact that the Guatemalan-Cuban-American actor channeled Han Solo’s spirit certainly made it easier to keep him around. “We were very fortunate when we got Oscar Isaac to play Poe’s character, because the role of Han in the first three movies, he’s the one that draws your eye, because you don’t know what he’s going to do” said writer Lawrence Kasdan. “It’s an archetype that all of us like. We wanted someone like that to be in this group.”
Check out the video above, and see some behind-the-scenes clips of Isaac.