From Entertainment Weekly:
“She is absolutely a very unlikely heroine,” the actress says. “She’s someone on the edges and fringes of society. Physically, she’s smaller than everyone else around her, but… when someone has something they believe in, that’s what powers them, that’s what motivates them, that’s what can give someone enormous strength.”
Edwards says he chose Jones because she wasn’t “so kick-ass and shields-up that the audience couldn’t empathize with her.”
“There were a lot of people who could learn how to fight and beat people up and do the physical side of it. For me, the most interesting thing is when there’s a crack in the armor, when you can glimpse the vulnerability in someone,” the director says. “You can just hang the camera on Felicity and not say a word, and you can feel her having a million different thoughts. You get interested in what she’s thinking and what’s going on. She can be very observant within a scene. It doesn’t always have to be about her directly, but we’re experiencing it through her. She just has that knack for pulling you in.”
Jyn can now join Daisy Ridley’s Rey from The Force Awakens as another inspiration to girls eager to fight for a good cause, but the character also has her own hero: Mon Mothma (played by Genevieve O’Reilly), the former Galactic Senator who is uniting the Rebel Alliance. There’s no doubt a lot of dudes make up the resistance fighting force, but women — such as Princess Leia at the diplomatic level, to Jyn on the battlefield — are its leaders.
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