Lando Calrissian

• 1. Introduction

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  Lando Calrissian is a fictitious character in the Star Wars franchise, introduced onscreen in 1980. In a review from that year, Janet Maslin of The New York Times called him "exaggeratedly unctuous, untrustworthy and loaded with jive." That verdict came from the character's first appearance, in The Empire Strikes Back, and versions of that same argument have followed him ever since. Lando has appeared and reappeared decade after decade, across film, television, novels, comics and video games. This documentary asks what George Lucas actually set out to build when he wrote him, why critics have never fully agreed on what he represents, and how a character introduced as untrustworthy became one of the more argued-over figures in the entire franchise.

• 2. Building A Foil For Han

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  While writing The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas began sketching a gambler-type character who would eventually become Lando Calrissian. Lucas pictured him as a suave con man with the elegance of James Bond and the wit of Star Trek's Spock, built to contrast with the "rough" swashbuckler Han Solo. In Lucas's original conception, the character would side with the Empire at first, convinced he could outsmart the Imperials, before coming to see the Rebellion as a cause worth backing.

  Lucas also considered making Lando appear human while secretly belonging to a clone line descended from a ruling clan. This lineage, in Lucas's plan, would explain Princess Leia's distrust of him and would tie his faction to the Galactic civil war of the original trilogy. He imagined Lando as "almost too perfect looking," a side effect of genetic manipulation in the cloning process, and pictured him resembling the actor Rudolph Valentino.

  None of that clone backstory made it to the screen, but the name Lucas gave the character did, and it would take decades and a prop cane to fully explain itself.

• 3. The Name And The Cape

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  Before Billy Dee Williams was cast, Lucasfilm considered Yaphet Kotto for the role of Lando Calrissian. When Williams read the script for The Empire Strikes Back, he decided the character's cape and his surname were "interesting things to build a character around."

  In 2019's The Rise of Skywalker, Lando's cane was designed to resemble Cloud City. The book The Art of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker states that the Aurebesh lettering on the cane reads "Baron Lando Calrissian." Fans, however, translated the same lettering differently, arriving at "Landonis Balthazar Calrissian III," a reading that the film's writers later confirmed as Lando's actual full name.

  Megan Farokhmanesh of The Verge noticed a small quirk: most characters pronounce Han's name "Hahn," but Lando alone says "Han." Donald Glover kept that same pronunciation deliberately in Solo: A Star Wars Story, to stay consistent with the earlier films.

  When Glover prepared to play the young Lando, he asked Williams for advice. Williams told him simply, "Just be charming," guidance Glover called "the best advice."

  That charm was about to be tested onscreen, in a friendship that begins with a betrayal at Cloud City.

• 4. Betrayal At Cloud City

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  In The Empire Strikes Back, Lando Calrissian is introduced as an old friend of Han Solo and the administrator of Cloud City. He is also revealed as the previous owner of the Millennium Falcon, the ship Han now flies.

  When Han, Princess Leia, Chewbacca and C-3PO arrive at Cloud City, Lando welcomes them as guests before secretly delivering them to Darth Vader. Vader intends to use the group as bait to draw out Luke Skywalker.

  Lando later explains that he only agreed to the betrayal because Vader threatened to place Cloud City under direct Imperial control. He permits Vader to freeze Han in carbonite, but his resolve breaks when Vader also takes Leia and Chewbacca prisoner.

  During the evacuation of Cloud City that follows, Lando helps the group escape aboard the Falcon. He then helps rescue Luke from the underside of the city, and promises to help track down Han.

  In Return of the Jedi, Lando helps Luke rescue Han from the crime lord Jabba the Hutt. He is later made a general in the Rebel Alliance and pilots the Millennium Falcon during the attack on the second Death Star.

  That rescue and that battle wrapped up the story Lucas had begun in 1980. What came next took the character somewhere the original trilogy never did.

• 5. Missing From Two Films

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  Lando did not appear in the first two films of the sequel trilogy, The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, a choice The Independent reported had displeased some fans. Rian Johnson, who directed The Last Jedi, considered writing Lando in as the codebreaker that Resistance members Finn and Rose Tico go searching for. He ultimately decided against it.

  Lando reappeared in the third film, The Rise of Skywalker, helping Rey and her companions search for a Sith wayfinder. He later recruits fighters from across the galaxy to join the Resistance's battle on Exegol.

  That same era carried Lando in a different direction entirely, back decades before Cloud City, to a card game that cost him his own ship.

• 6. Beyond The Two Trilogies

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  Donald Glover plays a younger Lando in the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story, set roughly thirteen years before The Empire Strikes Back. There, Lando is a gambler and semi-retired smuggler who owns a fast ship: the Millennium Falcon.

  Han needs a ship to steal a load of starship fuel, so he tries to win the Falcon from Lando in a game of sabacc. Lando cheats and beats him anyway, then agrees to join Han's mission for a cut of the profits. He is injured during the heist and abandons the group, and Han later tracks him down and wins the Falcon back.

  In December 2020, Disney announced a streaming series built around the character. By July 2023, reports said Glover would reprise the role and co-write the series with his brother, Stephen, though by September that year the project had been announced as a feature film instead.

  Billy Dee Williams reprised the role in two episodes of Star Wars Rebels, "Idiot's Array" and "The Siege of Lothal." In the first, Lando wins Chopper, the repair droid of the Ghost's crew, in a sabacc game, forcing an uneasy partnership that leads to their first run-in with the crime boss Azmorigan. In the second, the crew turn to Lando for help escaping Lothal under Imperial occupation. Lando is mentioned in other episodes too, and his name is later used as an alias by Ezra Bridger.

  Lando is a playable character in Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront II. In 2024's Star Wars: Outlaws, set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, he is voiced by Lindsay Owen Pierre as a charismatic, smooth-talking gambler and entrepreneur who assists the game's protagonist, Kay Vess. Williams himself voices the character in Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, helping Kyle Katarn reach Bespin, and Lando is playable again in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga.

  In comics, Lando anchors three miniseries: Lando, from 2015, set shortly before the original trilogy; Shattered Empire, also 2015, set after it; and Lando: Double or Nothing, from 2018, set just before Solo. Marvel's 2020 relaunch of its Star Wars series, picking up at the tail end of The Empire Strikes Back, shows Lando returning to Cloud City to recover his aide, Lobot, and help Luke search for his lightsaber. One novel, Star Wars: Last Shot, reveals that between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, Lando considers settling down with a Twi'lek girlfriend.

  All of that sits inside Disney's current canon. A far larger set of Lando stories exists entirely outside it, in stories the studio no longer counts as official.

• 7. Legends: The Other Lando

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  Following Disney's 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm, most Star Wars novels and comics published between 1977 and 2014 were rebranded as Star Wars Legends and declared non-canon. That relabeled body of work forms its own separate narrative universe, one where Lando took a very different shape.

  In the Marvel Comics series from that era, Lando's nemesis is a crime lord named Drebble. Lando uses Drebble's own name as a cover identity, so that any trouble caused by his schemes lands on Drebble instead. The plan backfires when the Rebellion honors the exploits of "Lando as Drebble," forcing Lando to present an award to Drebble for activities that were actually his own.

  In Legends novels set after Return of the Jedi, including Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy and several books by Kevin J. Anderson, Lando is a recurring figure chasing one entrepreneurial scheme after another. In The Corellian Trilogy, he goes on a galaxy-wide hunt for a wealthy wife, eventually marrying Tendra Risant and using her family's money to open a mining facility on the Outer Rim planet Dubrillion. In Fury, the seventh novel of the Legacy of the Force series, Lando tells Han and Leia that he and Tendra are expecting a child. According to Anderson, Lucasfilm considered killing off Lando at one point during this era.

  Star Wars Legends also includes The Lando Calrissian Adventures, a 1983 trilogy by L. Neil Smith that follows Lando's smuggling days before the original trilogy. Described as "space pulp," the three novels, Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu, Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, and Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka, were published by Del Rey in July, October and December of 1983. The first finds Lando arrested on the planet Rafa IV and forced to hunt for a legendary artifact called the Mindharp of the lost Sharu civilization, a detail later referenced in the novelization of Solo: A Star Wars Story.

  None of that made it into any film. What critics said about the Lando who did make it onto screen turned into its own long-running argument.

• 8. A Question Of Trust And Representation

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  Writing in 2008, the scholar Adilufu Nama said Lando "offered a new benchmark in the status of black representation in science fiction cinema."

  Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post, writing in 2015, called Lando a "fascinating and fraught part of the Star Wars legacy and the conversation around race in science fiction." She argued that Lando is the only Star Wars character with a "truly comfortable sense of style," and that Williams plays him like "an old-fashioned movie star in a futuristic setting without making the performance seem incongruous."

  Williams himself received backlash from children angered by Lando's betrayal of Han in The Empire Strikes Back. He believed their reactions would have been different if Lando were white. Williams maintained that Lando never really betrayed Han at all, but was instead "dealing, as best he could, with a situation that was presented to him by the Empire upon their arrival." Of the character more broadly, Williams wrote, "Lando is not black or white, he's just Lando. Above and beyond the arguments or discussions of bygone eras, he is of the future."

  A newer debate arrived with the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story. Jonathan Kasdan, a co-writer on that film, stated that Lando is pansexual, adding that he would have liked to include a "more explicitly LGBT" character in the movie. Asked about it, Donald Glover responded, "How can you not be pansexual in space? There's so many things to have sex with." In 2021, Lando appeared in a series of Marvel comics featuring LGBT characters.

  Megan Farokhmanesh of The Verge was unconvinced by Kasdan's framing, calling it "a piss-poor shot at representation" that conflated pansexuality with promiscuity. She compared it to J. K. Rowling's revelation that her character Albus Dumbledore is gay, despite his sexuality never coming up in any Harry Potter media.

  That comparison to Dumbledore is where the public record on Lando currently ends. Even the character's own name carries two accepted pronunciations, kal-RISS-ee-ən among them, a small reminder that very little about Lando Calrissian has ever been settled by just one telling.