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The first Star Wars standalone could come under attack from a clone.

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that Tatiana Maslany, the Canadian actress who stars as multiple replicants in BBC America's hit series Orphan Black, is testing for the female lead in the Star Wars spinoff that is being directed by Gareth Edwards.

Rooney Mara, who starred in the David Fincher version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, is also due to test this week among a handful of others, according to multiple sources.

Additionally Felicity Jones, who just received an Oscar nomination for best actress for her work in The Theory of Everything, is said to be on the want list, although there may be scheduling issues with Inferno, the Da Vinci Code sequel that Ron Howard is due to direct this spring and summer.

Plot and character details for the movie (will it focus on young Han Solo? Young Leia?) are being kept hidden deep in an R2 unit. Insiders say that reading and testing for the movie occurred in the U.K. in December and has now moved stateside.

At this stage, Lucasfilm has two Star Wars standalones in development, one with Edwards, the filmmaker behind last year's Godzilla movie, and Josh Trank. Only the Edwards one has a release date: Dec. 16, 2016.

Edwards' project is currently seeking writers after Garry Whitta completed a first draft and left the project.

In the aftermath, rumors surfaced that Simon Kinberg, who is already co-writing the Trank standalone with Lawrence Kasdan, would take over writing during. Sources, however, say that while Kinberg is creatively involved in Star Wars in an overall manner, there are no plans for him to take over. Kinberg is additionally crafting the X-Men universe, writing the X-Men: Apocalypse script for Fox and overseeing the upcoming Fantastic Four reshoots for which he did the rewrites.

Disney had no comment on the testing nor did the actress' reps.

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'Star Wars' Stand-alone Movie Hiring Oscar-Nominated Writer (Exclusive)
3:58 PM PST 1/26/2015 by Borys Kit, Austin Siegemund-Broka

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the latest scribe headed to a galaxy far, far away is Chris Weitz, whose credits include the 2002 film About A Boy and Disney's upcoming Cinderella.
He will replace Gary Whitta, who exited the Lucasfilm/Disney project earlier this month after he completed a first draft.

Weitz is both a screenwriter and a director, not to mention an author. He received an Oscar nomination for his adapted screenplay for About A Boy, which he also co-directed. His other directing credits include the Oscar-nominated Demian Bichir drama A Better Life, The Golden Compass (he also wrote the script adapting the Philip Pulman YA fantasy) and — perhaps most notably — The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

He's also in the middle of writing a YA trilogy set in a post-apocalyptic world, with the first book, titled The Young World, having hit shelves last summer. He is repped by WME.

His hiring on Star Wars isn't the first time the franchise has seen a change of writers. Michael Arndt worked on a treatment and script for what would become Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens before leaving it more than a year after commencing. J.J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan took over the scripting duties.

Edwards' Star Wars movie is heating up and is in the early stages of casting. Actresses were testing in Los Angeles last week.

The movie is one of two spin-offs Disney and Lucasfilm have in development, with Chronicle's Josh Trank set to direct the second.

It has a release date of Dec. 16, 2016, a year after The Force Awakens hits theaters.

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