A trio of actors from the ultra-violent The Raid and its sequel The Raid 2 are appearing in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Imagine it: martial arts experts extraordinaire who are also skilled at using any manner of blade or gun, showing up in a Star Wars movie. Remember when Ray Park was cast as Darth Maul? This is like that, only times three.
The report comes from Twitch's Todd Brown, who claims that Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman have put in secret appearances in The Force Awakens for director J.J. Abrams. Leave it to Abrams to grab the talented stars of a cult hit franchise and put them in Star Wars. Brown has no idea what characters the Indonesian performers are playing, but it's not hard to speculate.
So, let's!
The most obvious roles would be that of Sith. The Raid trio employ a particularly brutal fighting style in those films, so it's all too easy to imagine them as some kind of Sith warriors. If you remember, one of the film's rumored plots was a tie-in with the animated TV series Star Wars Rebels, where the show's Inquisitor villain would be revealed to be just one of many of an ancient sect dedicated to preserving the Sith at all costs. That rumor said that there would be multiple Inquisitors/Sith in The Force Awakens, so hmm.
On the flip side, the Raid trio could just as easily be playing Jedi. But most of the plot rumors suggest that "last of the Jedi" Luke Skywalker has been missing in the 25 year interim between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so who would have trained them? It just doesn't feel right.
Another possibility would be bounty hunters. Maybe even a team of three hunters who work together? Their roles are likely to be as small as Park's was in The Phantom Menace, if not smaller, so you could see these three popping up a few times as lethal forces of nature on the hunt for someone (aka, Luke) or something.
But the more of these leaks that appear, the more methinks there's something afoot in all this. Abrams is a savvy, ultra-secretive director who knows how to play the Internet game better than almost anyone in Hollywood; he's been doing it his entire career. What if most or all of these "leaks" are coming straight from Lucasfilm as part of Abrams' master plan to slowly disseminate information about the movie?
Even the conflicting reports on the movie's plot and characters could be intentional, as Abrams' way of keeping the real story a surprise. It's not so outlandish a theory — many filmmakers over the years have confessed to using false leaks as a means of holding on to their plot twists.
