Via Glamour.com:
Growing up, I always felt that the Star Wars films belonged to the boys, no matter how much I played with lightsabers or wore my hair like Princess Leia’s. When the galaxy finally expanded to accommodate a female lead—Daisy Ridley’s Rey—in 2015’s The Force Awakens, I rejoiced. Now Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which takes place 34 years prior to Rey’s rise, thrusts another bold woman front and center: Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso. Jones’ character is rash, assertive, and unrestrained—messy, thrilling traits that too few actresses get to tap into in big-budget action movies. Jones well understands how Jyn changes the game: As a little girl in a town outside of Birmingham, England, she dreamed not of saving planets but of playing love-struck Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Today, at age 33, the Oxford-educated actress is officially getting her turn as a new kind of Disney princess: “a very contemporary, kick-ass princess,” she says.
Jones has built a résumé deep with roles of take-charge women like Jyn. Last fall she played a doctor one mental leap ahead of Tom Hanks’ smarty-pants professor in Inferno; next up she’s a mother desperate to shield her son from the ugliness of her cancer in A Monster Calls. (Her raw, intelligent performance could earn her a second Oscar nod; she received her first in 2015 for her portrayal of Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything.) Says the self-proclaimed feminist: “What I love in my work is showing a full-sided woman, women who are strong but flawed.”
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