You can never get too much of Star Wars: Thandie Newton

Thandie Newton says there are many areas in the Star Wars universe that are intriguing and beg for deeper investigation. "This (the story of Solo: A Star Wars Story) is one area, but I can imagine so many others. I just think you can never get too much of Star Wars. It's such an enormous world, a galaxy far, far away that you just want more of," she says.

"There's that sense of passing the tradition of Star Wars from generation to generation, which is very reassuring for people. It hasn't changed. It's just evolved," adds the actor, who plays Val in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

The standalone film tells the story of how Han Solo met his future co-pilot Chewbacca before the events in the original 1977 Star Wars. It is the second anthology film after 2016's Rogue One. It also stars Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Donald Glover, Paul Bettany and Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The film will be released in India on May 25.

About how she became involved in the project, Newton says, "The project attracted me initially by the idea of a film devoted to the introduction of Han Solo to the whole Star Wars legacy. I was fascinated by that. And then this really interesting band of people that Han Solo meets on his journey, made up of Woody Harrelson, myself, and a couple of creatures."

Recalling her fascination with the franchise as a child, she says, "I remember as a child, just absolutely loving Princess Leia and Chewbacca and C-3PO, all these characters that just sort of entered your consciousness and never went away. So it's a modern set of films, but it feels like it's been part of our culture since the beginning of time. I guess that's partly because of the whole futuristic element of Star Wars."

Newton feels Ehrenreich has done a brilliant job in the film. "There's an anarchic glint in Harrison Ford's eye all the time, and that's something which has been instilled in this telling of his story. The actor who plays Han in our movie, Alden Ehrenreich, just does such a brilliant job of finding the character for himself without doing a copycat impersonation of Harrison Ford's work. He brings the character to life in such a brilliantly detailed way, which allows you to then connect it to the Han Solo that you know. So it honours it, but it also kind of lifts it to a whole other place."