His name is Eric. After escaping the exploding Death Star, the Stormtrooper who used to be a bottle-washer at Death Star Canteen is adjusting well to life on Earth.
The former elite soldier of the Galactic Empire has taken to some more gentler domestic rituals. Sometimes he wears jeans and takes bubble baths, or tries to grow a beard.
London-based photographer Darryl Jones documents Eric’s everyday travails on Instagram and Facebook, to the delight of his over 90,000 followers. Jones’ captions to the 2,000 images reveal a rich inner life of the introverted Stormtrooper. “There are and always have been thousands of people doing this sort of thing, but I think it’s the stories, the poems and the characters that hopefully make mine stand apart,” he told the BBC .
With the avalanche of new Star Wars toys that flooded the market yesterday for Force Friday, will the loner Stormtrooper finally get some friends? “Eric doesn’t need new friends, he is quite a grumpy guy that prefers to be alone,” Jones tells Quartz.
Eric sometimes figures in Jones’ day job as a food photographer for supermarket chain Tesco.
Earlier this year, he took Eric on a job-related shoot to Scotland where the grim-faced Stormtrooper got into the spirit and donned a kilt.
Jones tells Quartz that he plans to take the Stormtrooper on a bike tour of Britain next year and create a traveling picture book.