Speaking with USA Today, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards explained where his movie’s villain, Director Orson Krennic (played by Ben Mendelsohn), fits into the grand Imperial bureaucracy. Along the way he hints at a very interesting subplot we can expect to see unfold in Rogue One: the ascendancy of Grand Moff Tarkin.
It’s easy to forget that Grand Moff Tarkin was the main Star Wars bad guy in the original movie (which heretics call A New Hope). He led Darth Vader around like a dog on a string. It’s Tarkin, not Vader, who has the Emperor’s ear (“I’ve just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.”).
So if Orson Krennic is in charge of the Empire’s greatest weapon — the Death Star under construction in Rogue One — where’s Tarkin?
Edwards describes Krennic’s career as one of the last gasps of meritocracy before the Empire calcifies into a military of aristocrats. Mendelsohn originally asked if Krennic would have the same “posh English accent” as so many of the Empire’s officers, including Peter Cushing, who played Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars . But Edwards settled on a different approach. “It feels like if the Empire ever have a job vacancy they go to the Royal Shakespeare Company to headhunt people,” he said. “I like the idea that Ben’s character was much more working-class.”
Edwards describes Krennic of having achieved his lofty post “through sheer force of personality and ideas.”
This is borne out in a new Star Wars novel, Rogue One: Catalyst (due out Nov. 15), which describes Krennic’s origins in the private sector, running a company called Zerpen Industries. A capitalist, Krennic stands in opposition (in terms of identity and ideology) to the aristocratic upper crust of Palpatine’s Empire. And while his ambitious rise resulted in the Death Star program, Edwards told USA Today that he’ll discover the limits of his power and influence in Rogue One . Krennic “hits a brick wall in the hierarchy where they won’t let him in the club and it’s going to turn into a them-or-us situation: either Krennic… or Tarkin and the others.”
While we know that Orson Krennic is doomed, that Grand Moff Tarkin will assume power, it’s not yet clear exactly how. Will Tarkin ascend after Jyn Erso and the Rebellion kill his main political enemy? Or will Krennic’s failure to secure the Death Star plans find him disgraced in the eyes of the Empire? It seems, at the very least, that Gareth Edwards has put a lot of thought into the rise of Tarkin and what the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will mean for his brief tenure at the top, before Luke Skywalker blows his pompous ass up.
