Greg Grunberg continues to parlay friendship with J.J. Abrams into sweet Star Wars gigs
If there’s one thing that everybody had an issue with in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, it was the very noticeable absence of Greg Grunberg’s Snap Wexley, the Resistance pilot from The Force Awakens who… was played by Greg Grunberg (he had a line or two, but that was his most memorable trait if we’re being honest). Grunberg happens to be a good friend of Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams, who has managed to find a spot for him in Felicity, Alias, and Mission: Impossible III, and with Abrams coming back for Star Wars: Episode IX, he’ll once again be bringing Grunberg along for the ride.
Given the history we just mentioned, this isn’t totally surprising, but Star Wars fans may recall that The Last Jedi kind of ended with what was presented as the entirety of the tattered Resistance escaping in the Millennium Falcon. The assumption was that Snap Wexley had simply died off-screen at some point, possibly when the hangar with Poe Dameron’s X-Wing was blown up. However, the novelization of The Last Jedi apparently established that a handful of Resistance pilots—specifically, you guessed it, Snap Wexley—had gone off on some secret mission just before the events of the movie kicked off. It would’ve been easy for Episode IX to just ignore the events of a Star Wars book, as so many of us do, but apparently we’re sticking with it.
Unless, of course, Abrams decided Snap Wexley was a Jedi, and he’s coming back as a Force ghost to reveal that he’s really Rey’s dad.