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Is Star Wars: The Last Jedi's Admiral Holdo's hair real or a dye-job? Even Lucasfilm was confused, until a Marvel story had to set it straight

Why G. Willow Wilson says she will never write another Star Wars story

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of Star Wars lore. Even if you just count the new canon stories from the past decade, there’s so much to keep track of. In fact, there’s so much that not even Lucasfilm’s Story Group can keep it straight at times.

Comic book writer G. Willow Wilson recently spoke about a company that couldn’t keep their own lore straight, which resulted in them contradicting their own story notes. While Wilson doesn’t mention Star Wars by name, there are a few clues which gave it away.

“Some properties are more persnickety than others,” G. Willow Wilson said during a panel at Tampa Bay Comic Convention. “There’s one that everyone has heard of and everybody loves that I wrote for once and I probably will not again. I was sent this massive document. The thing I was writing was sort of a side character, not something that people were super into. But nevertheless, they had pages upon pages of background for the side character. And one of the bits was that she’s from this straightlaced culture, but she dyes her hair purple, and that’s her little subtle act of rebellion.”

“In the comic I show her dyeing her hair, and I got back these notes. This is like a six-page comic, this is not a long story, but I got almost as many pages of notes back as the comic was. And they were like, ‘Why is she dyeing her hair? Isn’t that her natural color?’ And I’m like, ‘You idiots, this is the document you gave me. I agree, it’s dumb. It should just be her natural hair color. She’s an alien. It could be purple. There’s no reason for all of this, but this is what you sent me.’”

Wilson chalks this confusion up to the size of the company and the amount of cooks they have in the kitchen. “The biggest problem I found is that often these properties are so large and there are so many sharp elbows that often the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, and you as the unfortunate person tasked with actually creating these stories are caught in the middle.”

In 2019 Wilson wrote a short story for the Star Wars anthology comic Age of the Resistance Special #1. The comic spotlights Admiral Holdo, the character Laura Dern played in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The story features a scene where Holdo dyes her hair purple. Between this and the other contextual clues, it seems that this was the comic Wilson was talking about.

Lesson learned, don’t feel bad if you are confused by Star Wars lore, because sometimes even Lucasfilm isn’t sure what a character’s canonical hair color is.


Get to know, understand, and love the Star Wars franchise more with our Star Wars watch order, guide to all the upcoming Star Wars movies & TV shows, and all the Star Wars movies and Star Wars TV shows ranked.

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Joshua Lapin-Bertone

Joshua Lapin-Bertone: Joshua is a pop culture writer specializing in comic book media. His work has appeared on the official DC Comics website, the DC Universe subscription service, HBO Max promotional videos, the Batman Universe fansite, and more. In between traveling around the country to cover various comic conventions, Joshua resides in Florida where he binges superhero television and reads obscure comics from yesteryear.

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