Jon Favreau will voice a "cool and important alien" in ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’.
The 51-year-old star shared a photo of himself alongside the movie’s director, Ron Howard, and its writer Lawrence Kasdan on Twitter earlier this month, and now the 63-year-old filmmaker has revealed why Jon had taken a break from directing the upcoming ‘Lion King’ movie to join them on set.
He retweeted Jon’s post – which was simply captioned "#starwars #solo" – and wrote: "Wondering why we r all together? @Jon_Favreau is voicing a very cool & important alien character for #HanSolo Flattered & fortunate I could pull him away from his #LionKing directing duties (sic)".
However, Ron ruled out a similar role for himself.
Asked by a fan if he’d voice a character, he replied: "Nope :-). Zero chance. But thanks for asking (sic)"
The ‘Swingers’ actor is a big ‘Star Wars’ fan and previously voiced Pre Vizsla in several series of animated spin-off ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’.
And at one point, the ‘Iron Man’ filmmaker was one of many names in the frame to direct ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ and admitted at the time he felt "giddy" just to be considered for the project.
He said: "I have had the good fortune of working with George [Lucas] and around George, and whether it is doing a voice on ‘Clone Wars’, or being at the Skywalker Ranch mixing ‘Iron Man’ – so I have been very happy and lucky to just experience the culture that Lucas has created, both in my own life growing up as a kid and professional – whether it was interviewing him at film festivals on stage, he is just a really wonderful, talented gifted guy who has changed the business so much, so I am just giddy, first and foremost as a fan, to see what happens with it.
"I think there is a lot of question marks of how they are going to do it, and who they are going to do it with, and what the story is going to be about; but to say that I am not excited about it is definitely an understatement. We’ll see."