Felicity Jones has reportedly beaten off competition from Rooney Mara and Tatiana Maslany to secure a role in a stand-alone Star Wars spin-off that will be helmed by Godzilla director Gareth Edwards.
Few details are known about the Disney and Lucasfilm project but the Oscar-nominated actor will star in it, with Chris Weitz, who wrote About a Boy and Antz, writing the script.
The film is the second spin-off planned around JJ Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, with the director of Chronicle, Josh Trank, also working on a project, which some have suggested may be about the origin stories of Princess Leia and Han Solo.
The studio has confirmed they are working towards a release date of 16 December 2016, and announced Jones’s appointment after testing took place in both the UK and the US.
Jones has recently risen to prominence after being nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Theory of Everything, where she stars alongside Oscar favourite Eddie Redmayne and plays Stephen Hawking’s first wife, Jane.
