Earlier this week, the press tour for next month’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker began in earnest, as J.J. Abrams sat down for several interviews, including one with Uproxx. Since this is a Star Wars joint, and since it’s a film directed and co-written by Abrams, however, very little was revealed in terms of what is going to happen in the ninth (and supposedly final) installment of the so-called “Skywalker Saga.” What Abrams did say, however, was that one of the movie’s closely-guarded scripts actually ended up on eBay, though Disney managed to secure it before it leaked.
“One of our actors, I won’t say which one — I want to, but I won’t — left it under their [hotel] bed and it was found by someone who was cleaning their place. And it was given to someone else, who then went to sell it on eBay,” he told Good Morning America on Monday. Well, two days later, John Boyega — who plays former stormtrooper turned resistance fighter in the film — cracked and admitted that he was Spartacus on the same ABC program.
“I was moving apartments, and I left the script under my bed. I was like, I will leave it under my bed and when I wake up the next morning, I will take it and then move,” he told GMA host Michael Strahan. “But then my boys came over and we started partying a little bit. And the script, it just stayed there. And a few weeks after, this cleaner comes in, finds this script and puts it on eBay for like £65. The person didn’t know the true value.”
Boyega added that things got “scary” once he, and everyone else as Lucasfilm and Disney, realized the script was missing. “I got calls from every official. Even Mickey Mouse called me, ‘What did you do'”
On the one hand, Abrams’s coy mentioning of the missing script and eBay auction on Monday, and Boyega’s fessing up to it two days later on the same morning talk show, feels like one big promotional ploy by the Walt Disney Company. On the other hand, who cares Even Werner Herzog is an avid Star Wars fan, at this point.