'Star Wars: The Force Awakens': How Harrison Ford Mentored the New Cast Members
Daisy Ridley, Oscar Isaac, John Boyega and Adam Driver spoke with "Nightline."
— -- As “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” stars Daisy Ridley and Oscar Isaac were preparing for their roles, they said they got a little on-set direction from “Star Wars” veteran Harrison Ford, who is back as Han Solo.
“I had already piloted the Falcon,” Ridley told ABC News' Chris Connelly in an interview for “Nightline.” “So when I stepped on with him [Ford], like, I went to get in it, and he was like, ‘That’s mine.’
“But it kind of wasn’t funny,” she said, laughing. “It was really embarrassing, and [director and co-writer] J.J. [Abrams] was like ‘Oh my God,’ but he was gracious.”
“He actually offered to teach me” to fly the Falcon, added Isaac, who plays pilot Poe Dameron. “He did say, ‘Remember, it’s in space.’ ... He was like, ‘I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just flipping switches and just pretending.’”
In “The Force Awakens,” Ridley, plays the bo staff-wielding character Rey, and John Boyega, plays an ex-Storm Trooper named Finn. Both are 23-year-old actors from the United Kingdom.
This was Ridley’s first film role and she said she decided not to watch the previous “Star Wars” movies beforehand.
“I was just trying to do a good job in the circumstances without thinking, ‘Ah, this would be a Luke thing,’ or ‘this would be a Han thing,’ which I think might have been the temptation otherwise,” she said.
But Boyega said he watched Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford's auditions on YouTube to help him audition for his role as Finn to get a grasp of what he called “'Star Wars' acting.”
“With Finn, there's a strange element of a balance of the hero thing and the comedy and the awkward quirkiness,” Boyega said. “In a normal movie, if you are in a ship and it was about to crash, the characters will call their family, and tell them they love them, and cry. But in ‘Star Wars,’ it's kind of like, ‘Woohoo.’ We've done a lot of that.‘Woohoo. ... Come on, buddy. Let's go. Get to light speed.’ So it's a different approach to danger.”
They are joined by “Girls” actor Adam Driver, who plays Dark Side demon Kylo Ren, who gets to brandish that much buzzed-about light saber.
“It's the first time that they've actually been able to put light in it, where it actually reflects onto people's faces and do special effects and 3-D printed everything,” Driver said. “It's pretty heavy.”
“The Force Awakens,” which will be released in theaters nationwide on Dec. 18, is set 30 years after “Return of the Jedi.” It’s the seventh film in the “Star Wars” series, and it brings back beloved characters from the original trilogy, such as Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Leia, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca and Ford as Han Solo. The on-set presence and involvement of the original cast members struck a chord with the new heroes.
“It's like, 'We're actually doing it. That's Chewbacca. That's Peter Mayhew. That's Anthony Daniels. That's Harrison [Ford], Carrie [Fisher] and Mark.’ That's what made it feel very real,” Isaac said.
And “the costume," Driver added, "does so much work for you and tells so much story. It's unfinished and unpolished... it grounds you in something... even though it's a long time ago in a galaxy far away.”
The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of ABC News and Lucasfilm.
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