Yesterday The Star Wars Show revealed several new details about the “Space Monkey” creature that was revealed during one of the panels at Star Wars Celebration Europe 2016. Now Entertainment Weekly has even more details about Bistan aka “Space Monkey”, and another alien called “Bigmouth” that briefly appeared on the Rogue One BTS footage shown at Celebration…

Yesterday Pablo Hidalgo revealed on The Star Wars show that “Space Monkey’s” real name is Bistan, that its race is an Iakaru, and that he is a gunner on an U-Wing.

Entertainment Weekly spoke with director Gareth Edwards who revealed some more bits on the character:

His real name: Bistan. He’s the gunner on a new starship known as the U-Wing, a sort of gunship and troop transport. “It’s not necessarily a character that we get to know, but I think he has a very memorable, iconic look,” said Edwards. “[He’s] one of my favorites. I can’t give away what happens to him.”

On the other alien EW reports:

“Bigmouth,” whose real name is Pao, a soldier who serves as a kind of platoon leader, coordinating the charge into battle. “There was this great design of this creature that’s mouth would open really wide, and he looked like he was really good at giving orders and shouting at people during a battle,” Edwards said. “I was like, ‘We’ve got to give him that moment in the film,’ and so [Pao] was born out of that.”

Gareth Edwards on the creature shop and the process of selecting the aliens:

He says aliens are just as important a part of the uprising against the Empire as the humans, but they didn’t know what they wanted until Neal Scanlan’s creature department got busy making designs. The best of the menagerie made it into the movie.

“It wasn’t like, ‘We’ve got this character, we need to design a creature for it, and here’s what this creature’s like,’” Edwards said. “It was more like we told the creature department to come up with a thousand ideas, and then it was like casting the movie. There were walls and walls of these different types of characters that we could’ve picked from. We just went through them, like, ‘God, he’s fascinating…. Who’s that…? And she looks amazing…! And what’s that there?’ Slowly, we got it down to our top hundred, and then it got even more refined.”

Source: Entertainment Weekly