Benicio Del Toro Compares His ‘Last Jedi’ Character to a Knife

When you first receive the information that Benicio Del Toro is playing a hacker named DJ in the upcoming Star Wars movie, your brain likely wonders if there's a rave planet in Star Wars where it's always 1998. I think we all realize that this is an elaborate ruse, not unlike the whole Khan nonsense in Into Darkness, and he'll be given an actual name and function in the story past what they're telling us now.

Del Toro himself seems very excited by the character's potential in a sci-fi/fantasy setting, as he tells Empire Online in a new interview, comparing his character to several who are lurking in other corners of pop culture...

"This character could come straight out of a Bob Dylan or Tom Waites song, or even a Dostoyevsky novel,” says Del Toro in the new issue of Empire. “He’s like something out of Dickens; there have been characters like him in all kinds of literature."

"He’s like a knife: if you grab him by the blade, he’ll cut you. If you grab him by the handle, he can be very, very useful."

So I imagine he'll be wielded by the handle by both sides, and one will accidentally also grab him by the blade. The character has got two action figures now—which admittedly doesn't mean much since Constable Zuvio has the same number and didn't appear in Force Awakens at all—so I think he's got a substantial part to play in the film. We'll all find out when The Last Jedi opens two weeks from tonight!