Meet ‘The Prodigal Son’, Heroes And Jaegers Of PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING
“Jake is the prodigal son,” Boyega tells EW. “He is a young guy who was on the cusp of greatness in his early days when he was training to be a Jaeger pilot, but he always had a troubled relationship with Stacker. I’m the son he didn’t really talk about in the first film … the product of Stacker’s first love.”
This time, Mako is Jake’s protector, despite their awkward history. “He felt he never lived up to his father’s expectations and so he decided to leave the Jaeger program and start stealing for a living,” Boyega says.
“When we meet him, he is living in an abandoned mansion in Santa Monica, which is half a mansion anyway because there’s a big Kaiju claw-swipe that has crushed part of it,” Boyega says. “He sells and buys stolen goods, and some of that includes Jaeger parts.”
“…They were brothers,” Boyega says, but that bond broke when Jake ran away. “Being in each other’s heads in The Drift, they know each other’s thoughts, so they have great moments of hashing out what happened in the past.”
“The Kaiju have found a new way,” Boyega says. “They are way more intelligent than we thought they were. The monsters you saw in the first movie were the test run, to see how the planet would hold up. The breach we thought was closed is not their only way into our world. Their plans are more specific. Jake leads the team in trying to build up a new defense against that.”
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