Hey, have you heard they made a new Star Wars movie? Yeah, it turns out J.J. Abrams took over the franchise from George Lucas for the saga’s latest installation, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and it opens this Friday in theaters nationwide. But hey, if your English isn’t all that hot, don’t worry about it, because Oscar Isaac has made a very special introduction for the film’s brand new Spanish-language trailer just for you and me.
That’s right, the Guatemalan-born Óscar Isaac Hernández Estrada, who stars in the film as X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, has looked each and every one of us deep in the eyes and declared in a neutral Spanish accent that Star Wars: The Force Awakens premieres “en cines el 18 de diciembre.” It’s a small but meaningful gesture coming from a film that has made waves for its diverse cast, as if the marketing team were reaching out directly to the Hispanic community and saying, “You, too, are in this film.”
And indeed we are, along with a starring turn by British-Nigerian actor John Boyega, and a number of prominent roles for women – like Mexican-born Lupita Nyong’o – that allow them to be just as badass as any male practitioner of the force. It’s a representative sample of talent that most reasonable human beings recognize as a demographic reality, but as Oscar Isaac himself admitted in a recent interview, “There’s a lot of idiots out there…” and those idiots recently took to social media to demand a boycott of Abrams’ expanded color palette.
Naturally, said idiots lost their foolish quest for sustained racial privilege, and now they can be even more irked to know that another Latino actor apparently made his way into the Force Awakens cast. According to a recent interview with Jimmy Fallon, Isaac’s Star Wars fanatic uncle showed up to the set one day giving away t-shirts reading “Estar Guars: Episode VII,” and Abrams immediately sent him to get suited up for a role as an unidentified extra.
Score one more for the Latinos in the Star Wars universe.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens opens in theaters on December 18, 2015.