New ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Revelations — Including One About Luke's Lost Lightsaber

Return of the Jedi once seemed like a happily ever after. But new revelations about the fate of the Galaxy and the principals of the original Star Wars films confirms that despite all that joyous Ewok dancing, a whole lot of drama went down after the Battle of Endor.

In a cover story for Entertainment Weekly’s fall movie preview, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams divulge a few details on the upcoming blockbuster (out December 18), a few of which should be particularly exciting to fans.

First and foremost, Harrison Ford's Han Solo will be playing a leading role in the movie alongside the new generation of actors. The new heroes — Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega) and Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) — will all end up aboard the Millennium Falcon at some point, as has been hinted by the behind-the-scenes footage shown at Comic-Con.

Hopefully that ride goes better than Finn’s experience with a TIE fighter, which we see smoking on the surface of the desert planet Jakku:

How much screen time Han’s love Leia, played of course by a returning Carrie Fisher, will receive is unclear, but she will have some major character development: After learning of her Jedi heritage in Return of the Jedi, Leia has come into a possession of the lightsaber that once belonged to her father, Anakin, and then her brother, Luke before he lost it and his hand in his Empire Strikes Back duel with Darth Vader. The lightsaber’s return was hinted at in the second teaser, during a voiceover about the Skywalker heritage with The Force.

We don’t learn much about Domhnall Gleeson’s evil General Hux in the story, but we do get this first clear look at him:

Speaking of evil, EW also brings us a little sliver of news about the movie’s mysterious big bad, Kylo Ren. While Lucasafilm didn’t give up much about the character, who is played by Adam Driver, they could reveal that Kylo Ren wasn’t his original name; he took it after joining the very mysterious Knights of Ren. The guess here is that they are darker than the more traditional Jedi Knights.

The story also details Star Wars vet Lawrence Kasdan’s involvement with the film; he helped write The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but sat out the prequels. He returned to cowrite the new sequel though based on the appeal of a wide-open canvas offered by Lucasfilm’s decision to erase the many years of Star Wars comic books, novels, and video games from the official canon.

“I thought, ‘Wow, okay, these people have lived — they’re in a different place in their lives, Han and Leia and so on,” he said. “They’ve lived the same 30 years I have. What would that be like? How would you see things differently?’ And I was trying to figure out how I saw things differently, and one of the surprises is that you don’t learn all that much. You haven’t become much wiser than you were, and things are not clearer to you, and the world is just as confusing as it always was — and that’s a kind of lovely thing to get to write about again. Age does not necessarily bring wisdom; it just brings experience.”

If that means we’ll still get a hot-headed, wise-cracking Han Solo, we’ll consider that lack of maturation a very good thing.

For more, head over to Entertainment Weekly.

Watch ‘The Force Awakens’ Comic-Con footage: