English Varieties in Star Wars side-story "Rogue One"

For a long time, English spoken by characters in fantasy and sci-fi movies has generally been American (e.g., Luke, Han, and Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy) or one of several British/Scottish varieties (from Obi-Wan Kenobi to the dwarves and elves in Lord of the Rings). In the world of linguistics, American and British English varieties are considered to be Inner Circle varieties: the dominant varieties with long histories, typically spoken by monolinguals or 'balanced' bilinguals from an early age (Kachru, 1985). Of course, there is little reason that would necessitate denizens of medieval fantasy worlds or intergalactic space travelers to speak English like Anderson Cooper or Benedict Cumberbatch, but hey, that's Hollywood. To me, that's what makes the creative choices in language so interesting in fantasy/sci-fi: it's much more of an arbitrary choice compared to say, a period drama or a biopic, which would require authenticity to a real-world context.

But the recent Star Wars side-story, Rogue One, has attracted some attention for featuring English colored by non-Inner Circle English varieties- and not just villains. Actor Diego Luna's Mexican roots are reflected in his portrayal of Cassian Andor (skip to about 1:19 to hear some Cassian lines):

As you can hear in the interview, Luna's Mexican English shines through his Cassian lines. However, before getting too excited about Mexican English as a full-blown variety being featured in the film, I would say it's mostly a Mexican accent that is featured. A full-blown variety of English would be marked by a set of distinct lexical and syntactic features in addition to phonology (pronunciation of particular sounds, intonation and stress patterns, etc.). You can hear a bit of a difference in Luna's interview, which was not scripted and rehearsed like movie lines are.

Donnie Yen's performance as blind temple guardian Chirrut Imwe piqued my linguistic attention, too. Yen is from Hong Kong (and a kung fu and action movie legend by the way), and Chirrut's lines reflect Yen's HK English. At this point, it's still difficult to track down Chirrut audio online, but I would be curious of any of Yen's distinct HK English features outside of pronunciation show up in the film, like plural marking that is quite different from standard American or British varieties (HK English plural marking is easily identifiable in Yen's interviews, e.g. "one of the main feature" at around 0:18 here: https://youtu.be/jyPdrKZ2grg).

So I don't know that new(er) English varieties have made their big splash in Hollywood yet, but this is still a cool thing that's happened with Rogue One.