George Lucas Came Up With the Name Axe (Woves) On the Set of ‘The Mandalorian’ Season 2
Simon Kassianides recently sat down with The HoloFiles to discuss his time on The Mandalorian as Axe Woves, Bo-Katan’s companion-turned-foe-turned-ally, whose name has a very cool behind-the-scenes backstory.
As revealed during the interview, when George Lucas visited the set of season 2 in early 2020, he apparently suggested Favreau and Filoni name one of the characters “Axe”, which they eventually did, as Kassianides explained it:
“My very first time meeting Jon [Favreau] and Dave [Filoni], and being fitted, for Season 2… Jon and Dave looked at each other and asked if I knew how the character got his name. I just said it’s a pretty cool name. And they said that the day that George Lucas visited the set, he was sitting there and just suggested that there should be a character called Axe, quite randomly. But from that moment onwards I thought, ‘I better get my textbooks out.’ I mean humbling, right? I mean, you’re involved in something like that. And you realize that the guy conjured up this really cool name. You know just that it adds to it all.”
In the second season, the character only appeared in Chapter 11 and didn’t have a lot to do besides act as Bo-Katan’s bodyguard. As Katee Sackhoff revealed in an interview with Kristian Harloff, they had actually shot Woves’ death scene for that episode, which is why he wasn’t brought back for the finale. But at some point, they decided to cut it out, and the character returned for season 3 to play a pivotal part in Bo-Katan’s arc. Kassianides probably couldn’t have been happier; Sackhoff also revealed that the actor is a massive fan of the franchise, which he himself corroborated to The HoloFiles:
“You hope that you’re going to get a good reaction, especially being a fan myself. There’s a bit of a gap between when you finish filming, and when it comes out so there’s always a bit of trepidation. You’re always sitting there thinking, ‘Was there broccoli in my teeth, [laughs] or you know, how is this gonna come across?’ But now that it’s over? It’s just been incredible. The feedback and how everyone’s responded to the character. It’s just been so rewarding in so many ways. How people are really happy with the character [Axe Woves] and what it represents to a lot of people. I’ve had such a spectrum of reactions, all positive.”
With the third season, he also had the chance to bring more layers to the character, both through the scripts and also by giving him a backstory from the costume and everything around him:
“I certainly imagined a lot of pain [in Axe Woves], and a lot of empathy. Looking at the insignia even on his arm, you know he is part of the Nite Owls, but he has no Nite Owl insignia. There’s no emblems on on the shoulders. There’s nothing about the helmet, so I thought, ‘Where do I go from that?’ Well, I’ve got to imagine that this character exists in a realm of his reputation on the battlefield. Maybe he built a reputation. And then the pain that he has when he’s on the drop ship with Paz Viszla, and he says he was here when it happened. What happened to him? How did he get off the planet? The decision to show some of that pain, those were choices of mine.”
The character did survive the season, and in fact, we watched him with the rest of the Mandalorians during the final moments of Chapter 24, yelling “For Mandalore!” during Ragnar Vizsla’s initiation ceremony. There was some online chatter after the episode aired that perhaps Ragnar, son of the late Paz Vizsla, could be Axe’s foundling; this is what Kassianides said about it when asked:
“I have not heard anything of that. Butwhen you hear about [these fan theories], you think, ‘Wow, you know what? These are the best, you know. I know that Jon [Favreau] is so meticulous, and Dave, that the positioning and that choice to say that line and have that in frame and choose that frame isn’t by accident.”
You can check out the entire video interview here:
The Mandalorian season 4 is coming, though it’s unknown if Kassianides will be back. The project had started pre-production aiming for an October shoot before the writers went on strike; now, it’s unknown if they will be able to meet that deadline.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
