Entertainment Weekly has just posted another article about “The Force Awakens,” and in this one, J.J. Abrams talks about the origins of the names they came up with for the main characters in the movie!
Here’s the breakdown on how J.J. Abrams came up with the different character names from Entertainment Weekly:
Finn And Rey:
The runaway stormtrooper played by John Boyega was known only as Finn, and Daisy Ridley’s desert scavenger was identified only as Rey. I finally got to ask: Is that deliberate? Is there a piece of information that’s being held back there about their names — perhaps because their last names are ones we may already know?
Abrams isn’t ready to reveal their full identities, but did confirm that this theory was getting warm. “I will only say about that that it is completely intentional that their last names aren’t public record,” he says.
They also revealed that in the image below, the scavenger in the image is name Teedo, and the creature he’s riding on is called a Luggabeast
Poe Dameron:
“Dameron came out because it was, obviously, a name that I know, and it just musically felt right,” Abrams says. “There was no sort of deep reasoning behind it, and I also knew it would make Morgan blush if we named a character that. So she had this giant smile on her face.”
He thought he might change it eventually, but then got used to it. “We kept it for awhile, and it just stuck like things that work seem to,” Abrams says.
“We went through a bunch of different names, and Poe ultimately felt like the right name,” he says, though he admits there may have been a deeper meaning than he realized. “Someone reminded me recently that my daughter had had a polar bear named Poe [or Po’ — short for “polar”], and that might’ve been why it felt right. There was a kind of sweetness to, and a charm to that name.”
BB-8:
Abrams chose the droid’s name because it looked round and bouncy. “I named him BB-8 because it was almost onomatopoeia,” the director says. “It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the 2 B’s.”
A lot of names were second-guessed into oblivion, but this is one they never changed, from very early on. “It’s funny how sometimes, the bad ideas, you try them out and kick the tires a little bit, and it just kind of falls apart and you can go somewhere else, you’ve just got to know it’s temporary. And that one, he never had another name. But Bryan Burk, whom I adore, is not the father of that name.”
Genral Hux:
Hux is young for a general, according to the filmmaker, who says that in this scene the military leader stands in his command center, longing to reveal the full might of The First Order’s military power to an unsuspecting galaxy.
His name doesn’t have the same meaning as the others. In fact, it’s hard for Abrams to remember the origin, although he thinks it came to him during the long storytelling walks he would take with co-screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan.
“Larry and I would walk all over the place when we were breaking the story, and we would record our conversations,” Abrams says. “We were walking through a cemetery that’s near the Bad Robot offices, and we would often, as we were talking about characters, sort of just be glancing at names to see if any of them stuck. I don’t believe that Hux came from there, but it may have.”
Captain Phasma:
“Phasma I named because of the amazing chrome design that came from Michael Kaplan’s wardrobe team. It reminded me of the ball in Phantasm, and I just thought, Phasma sounds really cool.”
Nothing too groundbreaking was revealed, but when it comes to Finn and Rey having their last names purposely not revealed yet, it’s just adding more fuel to the fire regarding certain rumors about Rey!
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