Why Are People Asking Laura Dern About Baby Yoda?

On Monday night, a bunch of miscellaneous celebrities came together to watch Marriage Story win a lot of awards at IFP's annual Gotham Awards in New York City. One of these celebrities was Marriage Story's Laura Dern, whose part as Scarlett Johansson's divorce attorney is arguably the best supporting performance in a movie this year. But when Variety chatted with Dern on the red carpet, they didn't spend the whole time talking to her about her role or Noah Baumbach's sweater or even whether you should watch Marriage Story on a phone or a large iPad. Instead, they asked a question about, uh, Baby Yoda.

Just watch:

Now, the actual interaction is pretty bizarre. Dern says that she thinks she saw Baby Yoda "at a basketball game," which seems unlikely, unless the NBA has figured out a way to momentarily disrupt tracking fobs and started slinging bone broth in the stands. Of course, Dern most likely just misheard or misunderstood the question, perhaps thinking it was about Lil Baby or DaBaby and not a fictional, 50-year-old green toddler with fearsome force powers. We'll never quite know what she was thinking, since she shuts down the reporter's future questions with a simple "That’s all I’m going to say."

We can speculate all we want about what is going on in this strange, confusing exchange and wonder if maybe, just maybe, Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau decided to sneak the Baby Yoda puppet into the Staples Center recently, but the whole thing brings up an even more important question—namely, why is anyone asking Laura Dern about Baby Yoda in the first place?

Dern may have played a pivotal part in The Last Jedi, but that was years ago and has only the vaguest connection to the alien creature that has captured our collective hearts and imaginations and whatever lately. Wouldn't we rather hear Dern talk about her excellent monologue in the end of Marriage Story? Or the underlying sexism in her character's reputation as a cut-throat lawyer when her actual aggressiveness in the courtroom pales in comparison to Ray Liotta's? Or about how… well, no. Let's be honest here. We just want to hear about Baby Yoda. We cannot get enough Baby Yoda.

Our shared love for the little green thing has grown so big and all-encompassing that it has swallowed all pop culture into its adorable, frog-eating maw. Fine, whatever. Accept it. We need every celebrity's take on Baby Yoda, right now.