The Hollywood Reporter catch up with writer Alex Segura, the author behind Star Wars Poe Dameron: Free Fall, the young adult novel that tells the backstory of the Resistance hero in the years before he joined the fight against the First Order.
(W)hat’s it like being the writer who gets to fill in the blanks on one of the major characters of the new trilogy, especially coming on the heels of revelations from The Rise of Skywalker?
Of the characters introduced in the new trilogy, I definitely felt the most drawn to Poe, especially with the details you learn in the comics by Charles Soule and in the prose novels by so many great authors like Greg Rucka. He’s a hero, but he has a scoundrel side to him — a glint in his eye that tells you he’s not afraid to cut corners or bend the rules to get what he needs. But he also has a heart, and he’s loyal and driven. That’s a lot!
I always wondered what his story was — what made him this way. There’s just a lot of fertile ground to cover. Poe is a complicated person — and when we meet him in The Force Awakens, he’s such a defined, charismatic, and powerful presence — to have the chance to go back and fill the blanks and show how Poe came to be the man we meet on the big screen, well, that’s a huge honor and responsibility. It’s certainly not something I took lightly, and I did my best to immerse myself and revisit a lot of the source material. And, of course, I walked hand in hand with the great team at Lucasfilm and Disney Books, who were invaluable in terms of being a sounding board and making sure I had everything I needed.
I just wanted to do justice by him and give readers a chance to meet an earlier, less defined version of Poe — but one that still retains all the things they’d easily recognize and root for. It’s clear from page one of the book that this is a Poe Dameron adventure, and a very important one that reveals not only details about him, but key characters in his life.
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- Hardcover Book
- Roanhorse, Rebecca (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 320 Pages - 11/05/2019 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
