Spoilers
At the end of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it looks like Chewbacca got the short end of the stick again. First, he doesn’t get a medal for his role in the Battle of Yavin in A New Hope, then Leia forgets to comfort him after Han Solo died on Starkiller Base. If this really annoyed you, director J.J. Abrams has an explanation for it.
In an interview with Slash Film, Abrams called his decision to have Leia (Carrie Fisher) hug Rey (Daisy Ridley) instead of Chewie - even though Leia had never met Rey before - “one of the mistakes I made in that.”
Abrams explained that he thought Chewie’s first priority would be getting Finn (John Boyega) medical attention. Leia also recognized Rey’s strength in the Force, so they felt a connection, which explains why they hugged.
“So I tried to have Chewbacca go off with him and focus on Rey, and then have Rey find Leia and Leia find Rey,” Abrams said. “The idea being that both of them being strong with the Force and never having met, would know about each other — that Leia would have been told about her beyond what we saw onscreen and Rey of course would have learned about Leia. And that reunion would be a meeting and a reunion all in one, and a sort of commiseration of their mutual loss.”
Abrams said that he really flubbed with the set-up of the scene, since we could clearly see that Chewie was right near Leia when she hugged Rey. If he blocked the scene differently, we might have seen Chewie carrying Finn.
“Had Chewbacca not been where he was, you probably wouldn’t have thought of it,” Abrams explained. “But because he was right there, passed by Leia, it felt almost like a slight, which was definitely not the intention.”
Leia’s rush to meet Rey has sparked some speculation that she knew Rey before thanks to some connection she might have to the Skywalker family. We won’t find out if that’s the case until Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: Episode VIII opens on Dec. 15, 2017.