The Cast of Star Wars: The Last Jedi Has Mixed Feelings on Porgs

By now, even if you haven’t seen them, you’ve heard tell of the porgs, the little furry birds making their debut in Star Wars: The Last Jedi later this month. We first saw them in a big behind-the-scenes video from the set of the movie released a few months ago, and then saw them in action in the most recent trailer, one of them hollering away in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. Unfortunately, the porgs do have their detractors, including at least one member of The Last Jedi’s cast.

“When we would bring the puppet out on set, that’s when I first got my inkling,” director Rian Johnson told Jimmy Kimmel on Friday night. “Because the work would stop on set and be like, ‘Oh that’s so adorable,’ and half the crew would be giving it the side eye a little bit.”

Mark Hamill said that he’d even gotten in trouble with Disney for tweeting about “wholesome porg-nography.”

“People forget, these movies were made for children,” he said. “No,” Kimmel corrected, “they’re made for middle-aged nerds now.”

The porgs, who live with Luke Skywalker on his island hideout, Ahch-To, have already taken over the Internet, even getting their own hashtag emoji on Twitter (for which Johnson is very sorry). But one cast member of The Last Jedi would be happy if he never saw a porg ever again.

“I just naturally don’t like them,” John Boyega said. “I don’t. I was in the Falcon and there was a hole and there were little porgs all bunched together and then there were big ones. They had the puppets blinking and all that kind of stuff. I’m not into it.” He described them as being “all over the place,” so there will probably be at least one scene where the spaceship gets infested with little bird-gerbils. At least one stows away onboard—we’ve seen it in the trailers, screeching its little head off before Chewbacca unceremoniously tosses it off the dashboard. Chewbacca actor Joonas Suotamo feels badly about that, by the way.

But not everyone is so heartless. When Kimmel asked the assembled cast members if any of them did like the little aliens, Oscar Isaac said he was adamantly “pro-porg.” Andy Serkis even joked that he’d asked Johnson if he could perform one scene in motion-capture as a porg. “We talked through a storyline,” he said, “but it just didn‘t evolve in the way I thought that it might.” Oh, well.

Kimmel also showed off Entertainment Weekly’s four new Last Jedi magazine covers, the biggest cheers for which naturally went to the one featuring Luke Skywalker and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia. Some things never change.