The Fandom Menace Volume One - A Fandom Betrayed (The Fandom Menace Volumes Book 1)

by Stephen Walton

After The Force Awakens, for whatever reason, length of picture, whatever, it all got cut out. So, 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!’ I wasn’t quite dead yet. We finished all of our bits and they asked me to come down to camera. And I thought, ‘Oh well, maybe they’re going to say thank you for being one of the heritage characters and giving 30 years and all that.’ But what they did was, they gave me a Millennium Falcon sign that had the day and the date on it, the scene number, and they said, ‘Can you look at camera and say 'It's a wrap?' Because that would be really funny.’ … I was actually in tears in the suit because I thought - 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 in to the box was a big joke about ‘It's a wrap.’ They just thought ‘Wouldn’t it be funny?’ And that was the sum total of my life as Ackbar." -Admiral Ackbar Actor, Tim Rose