The Café de Flore in Paris has seen its share of heady artistic summits. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir regularly slid into its moleskin banquettes to contemplate the fate of the galaxy and man’s place in it, as did Picasso and Camus. And one night last year, it was where J. J. Abrams and Oscar Isaac contemplated a specific man’s place in one particular galaxy, far, far away.

Isaac says he had been summoned to Paris for what he suspected might be a role in The Force Awakens. Sure enough, earlier that day, he had met with Abrams, screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan, and Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, and Abrams had pitched him the character of Poe Dameron, a badass fighter pilot battling against the remnants of the Empire.

“He’s amazing!” said Abrams.

“Sounds good!” thought Isaac, whose first experience in a movie theater had been seeing The Empire Strikes Back.

“He opens the whole movie!” said Abrams.

“Sounds great!” thought Isaac.

“And then,” Abrams went on. “He dies.”

“Oh,” thought Isaac.

“I’d done that before,” he told me later. “Set up the plot for the main guy and then die spectacularly.” (He had played just such a role in The Bourne Legacy.)

Abrams could surely feel the enthusiasm drain out of the actor when he revealed Dameron’s fate. “I guess that’s not what you hoped for when you got on a plane to Paris,” he said. Thus the invitation to join him at Café de Flore, where Abrams patiently sipped coffee while Isaac sat hunched over the director’s iPhone, reading one of the most closely guarded scripts in the history of film. Abrams hoped to convince the actor that there were still compelling reasons to join the Star Wars fraternity.

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“I wanted to impress upon him how much I wanted this to work,” Abrams remembers. It was a chance, he told Isaac, to create a role that could live on in all corners of the Star Wars universe—novels and comic books and video games and so on. The conversation lasted well into the night. “We talked about the story and who this character could be,” Abrams says. “I loved the collaboration. People like Oscar are the people you listen to.”

Still, when they parted, Isaac remained hesitant.

“I went back home [to New York], and I thought about it,” he says. “Then I wrote him and said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it!’ I figured it would be a cameo: I’ll come in, do my thing, and maybe it’s actually better not to have to sign myself up for three movies.” By that time, though, things had changed and Abrams soon wrote back: “Never mind. I’ve figured it out. You’re in the whole movie now.”

“I was like, ‘Holy shit! Alright, cool,’ ” Isaac says.

As with all things concerning Star Wars plot points, Abrams keeps exactly what went on in the interim close to his vest. “Let’s say that it was in that conversation [in Paris] that we began to see a way that being in the movie would be worth his time and the audience’s,” he says.

For us, it’s just another beautiful reminder that, as Isaac told GQ, “It’s all fucking made up!”