Actor Tim Rose, who played Admiral Ackbar in three “Star Wars” films said that when his last scene as the character was filmed, he felt slighted that he was asked to make a joke instead of being thanked for playing the character .
Rose said, “After waiting 30 years to reprise Ackbar, I was a little disappointed with Ackbar’s role in that picture. So in ‘The Last Jedi,’ I was quite looking forward to maybe them giving him something more juicy. We were only given the script on the day when we were shooting that piece of script, so each day I would come to work going, ‘Is today the day when Ackbar gets something a bit more involving?’ And I looked at my script and I went, ‘Oh, Ackbar’s going out of the window. Well, that’s that then!’”
Rose said:
They asked me to come down to the camera. And I thought, oh, well, maybe they’re gonna say thank you for being one of the heritage characters, and giving 30 years and all that, and y’know, being all that. But what they did was, they gave me a Millenium Falcon sign that had the day and the date on it and the scene number and they said, “Can you look in the camera and just say, ‘It’s a wrap” cause that would be really funny.’”
He continued, “I was actually in tears in the suit because after everything, after hoping there’d be something, after knowing there wasn’t going to be anything else, Ackbar’s final moment before he went into the box was just a big joke about ‘It’s a wrap.’ I disappeared down the back and couldn’t come out for a good thirty minutes after that.”
Rose played Admiral Ackbar in “Return of the Jedi,” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” and concluded the character in the upcoming “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” He also puppeteered the characters Sy Snootles and Salacious Crumb in “Return of the Jedi.”
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Rose claimed that decades ago, he almost lost his job on “Return of the Jedi,” when he was playing Salacious Crumb. Rose told YouTube interviewer Jamie Stangroom that when the scene was shot in which Han Solo is rescued by Princess Leia and they kiss, Rose, the actor playing Jabba the Hutt and some other actors joked, “We saw you kissing!” Rose said that Harrison Ford, playing Solo, protested to director Richard Marquand, “Are these puppet characters going to laugh over my line? Cause I don’t want to have to come back and do ADR.”
Instructed to remain silent for the second take, Rose said, Marquand asked after the take what he thought. Rose, unaware of a hot mic under the floor, falsettoed, “Eh, this Harrison guy, is he gonna talk over our laugh? ‘Cause it’s really putting me off!” Rose claimed, “The crew found it funny, but Harrison didn’t, and he left the set and he said he wasn’t coming back until the person who said that was fired from the production.” But Ford did not know who had uttered the remark, and the directors told Rose to pretend to be his own replacement, so that was that.
