Before Luke fired the blast that detonated the Death Star, before Leia launched R2-D2 to a remote desert world with secret plans for that battle station, someone had to locate and steal those schematics.

Turns out, it was a team effort.

In this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly, we bring you an inside look at Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which explores just how the Rebellion came to possess the information that revealed the fatal flaw in the Empire’s super weapon. It’s a battlefield heist that fans have been imagining for nearly 40 years, described in the opening crawl of 1977’s original Star Wars, with little details scattered throughout.

The new film from director Gareth Edwards (2014’s Godzilla) will finally fit those peices together to form a full story – revealing never-before-seen characters while also reintroducing a few classic ones. We’re confirming a big one on our cover: the galactic man in black himself, Darth Vader.

Here’s what else to expect this week from EW’s own peek at Lucasfim’s secret plans:


The background of our cover showcases new Imperial weaponry being used against the nascent Rebellion: taller, slimmer walkers known as AT-ACTs hauling cargo, and flatter, fang-like interceptors known as TIE Strikers.

New information about Jyn Erso (The Theory of Everything’s Felicity Jones), the outlaw who has clashed with both the Rebellion and the Empire, and now has a chance to clear her ledger of past wrongs by leading a mission for the good guys. It’s also personal – her father, played by Mads Mikkelson, is a scientist whose knowledge is sought by both sides.

Full details of the squad of characters uniting to take on the Empire, played by the most multicultural cast to appear in a Star Wars film yet: Diego Luna, Jiang Wen, Donnie Yen, Riz Ahmed, Forest Whitaker, and Alan Tudyk – as a performance-capture droid. (One of these has been seen before by Star Wars fans.)

A look at the skullduggery inside the Imperial ranks, as seen through the eyes of a new villain: Ben Mendelsohn’s ambitious officer, who’s eager to earn the favor of the Emperor – and avoid the wrath of his black-masked enforcer.

Candid revelations from the filmmakers about what the current reshoots are adding to the story as the film nears its December release.

Finally, confirmation of what fans have hoped ever since the project was announced: Vader is back. We have a run-down of the Sith lord’s first day on set, and what his return means for the larger Star Wars storytelling universe.

For more on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, pick up the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, on stands Friday.

Full details of the squad of characters uniting to take on the Empire, played by the most multicultural cast to appear in a Star Wars film yet:

Diego Luna, Jiang Wen, Donnie Yen, Riz Ahmed, Forest Whitaker, and Alan Tudyk – as a performance-capture droid. (One of these has been seen before by Star Wars fans.)

???? (Forest Whitaker)

This character has a past that Star Wars completists will recognize immediately when they see his name, even if he looks very different than the way they've seen him elsewhere. (He even looks different from when we saw him in the teaser trailer.) There's so much to say about this character, we’re going to save his revelation for later today. Check back to EW.com around 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT for a deeper exploration of this shadowy figure ...

This character has a past that Star Wars completists will recognize immediately when they see his name, even if he looks very different than the way they've seen him elsewhere.

Meet the Rebel fighter who’s so extreme that the other good guys aren’t sure if he really is one.

Forest Whitaker’s character has been one of the more closely held secrets of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but Lucasfilm is ready now to make his identity official: this shadowy freedom-fighter is Saw Gerrera, a figure with a surprisingly deep background in galactic history.

The warrior — seen in the Rogue One trailer asking, “If you continue to fight, what will you become?” — was actually first seen in season 5 of The Clone Wars animated series, when he was a young man on the planet Onderon, unleashing guerilla combat on the droid army of Separatists who took over his world.

Along with his sister, Steela, he fought alongside Darth Vader — back when the Sith lord was just an impetuous young Jedi named Anakin Skywalker. In the episode A War on Two Fronts, which aired in October 2012, Saw and Steela were part of an insurgent group being unofficially trained by Anakin, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the padawan Ahsoka Tano.

While it wouldn’t be right to spoil what happens to their characters in that story arc, which can be caught up with now on Netflix, suffice to say that Saw pays a steep cost for his resistance, and remains mistrustful of any authority except his own for the rest of his days. There never will be a peacetime for him.

In the show, Saw was voiced by Andrew Kishino, and Whitaker’s appearance has some subtle homages to The Clone Wars character. The eyes are different — the animated show featured vivid aquamarine eyes, while Whitaker’s are brown — but they maintained the scar that slices up over his left eye. (In the cartoon, it bisects the eyebrow, but in the live-action film, the cut arches just above it.) In this new image of Whitaker, he also looks fairly different than what we first saw in the trailer. Here, he has a full head of hair, while in the previous footage he was shaved.

By the time Rogue One takes place, just before the events of 1977’s original Star Wars, more than two decades have passed since the events of Revenge of the Sith. As played by The Last King of Scotland Oscar-winner, Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera is bulkier, more battle-hardened with the years, and maybe a little shellshocked. He has continued to fight; and, as he suggested in the trailer, he has become something — and it’s not quite a hero. Rather, he’s a man who has tried to do the right thing by occasionally doing questionable things.

“Consider him kind of a battered veteran who leads a band of Rebel extremists,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy tells EW. “He’s on the fringe of the Rebel Alliance. Even [they] are a little concerned about him.”

One reason we saved his reveal until now, in addition to him having a deeper backstory than the other new characters, is that Saw is an ally to the Rebel squad in Rogue One, but he’s not really one of them. “He’s off on his own,” Kennedy says.

In Claudia Gray’s recent Leia-centric novel Star Wars: Bloodline, set approximately midway between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, the princess-turned-politician is confronted by a rival who challenges her on the “terrorist tactics of the Rebel Alliance,” specifically citing “the campaigns of Saw Gerrera’s Partisans.”

For Rogue One, they needed a character on the borderline, someone who would represent the extreme end of the fight against the Emperor. Producer John Knoll’s idea was to show how the Death Star is a threat that pulls the disparate Rebel factions into a place of unity. The Lucasfilm story group plucked Saw Gerrera from Clone Wars history as a good candidate for a radical.

“The Death Star is the event that sort of pulls everybody into a place of unity, and prior to that it’s a little bit more divided. Who are at the different ends of that spectrum?” says Kiri Hart, Lucasfilm’s head of story development.

It was also a way to incorporate a character created by George Lucas, who has stepped back from Star Wars storytelling after selling Lucasfilm to Disney, but was deeply involved in The Clone Wars series with executive producer Dave Filoni (now overseeing the animated Rebels show).

Hart and fellow story group member Pablo Hidalgo were among those knew some of the as-yet-unseen character storylines that Lucas had in mind, and Saw’s fit right in with what they needed for Rogue One.

In that way, Saw Gerrera’s part in this movie could be called — destiny.

New information about Jyn Erso (The Theory of Everything’s Felicity Jones), the outlaw who has clashed with both the Rebellion and the Empire, and now has a chance to clear her ledger of past wrongs by leading a mission for the good guys. It’s also personal – her father, played by Mads Mikkelson, is a scientist whose knowledge is sought by both sides.