‘Skeleton Crew’: Jude Law and Chris Ford Tease Crossovers With Other New Republic Era Shows, Discuss Working With the Daniels, and More
Skeleton Crew co-creator Chris Ford and lead actor Jude Law were guests on the most recent episode of the Dagobah Dispatch podcast by Entertainment Weekly to discuss the upcoming Star Wars show, which is expected to be released on Disney Plus before the end of the year. The story is centered around a group of four kids who get lost in outer space, and when trying to find their way back home, get into various adventures along with Jude Law’s adult character.
No footage has been publicly released so far, but there was a short teaser previewed at Star Wars Celebration Europe, exclusive to attendees, that featured Jude Law’s yet-unnamed character levitating an object. No one will confirm that he’s actually a Jedi, and the entire team remains tight-lipped about the character’s origins and motivations. And yet, Law hinted that the kids will not always find him entirely on their side:
“I can’t tell you very much about my character. He is someone the children meet on their attempt to get home. He is like a lot of the world that they experience: contradictory, and at times a place of nurture and other times a place of threat.”
At some point, though, Lucasfilm will have to start opening up about him and the kids. It’s already going to be a hard job to market a show with five unknown characters in the lead, especially if four of them are children, but if they now get into a situation where they won’t even say a word about the characters or the meat of the story, the numbers will simply not be there for the show while it airs.
Instead, Skeleton Crew will have to rely on word-of-mouth from diehard Star Wars fans, almost regardless of how hard they go in on their marketing, and a key ingredient to getting people buzzing in today’s social media-driven world is through cameos by popular characters. Because the show is set in the New Republic era, concurrent to The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and The Book of Boba Fett, there’s always been the possibility of cameos by some of the characters from those shows. (Jon Favreau also hinted last year that the characters from Skeleton Crew might appear in the fourth season of The Mandalorian.) While Ford didn’t confirm as much, he certainly teased that we’ll be seeing familiar faces from time to time:
“There may or may not be some crossovers. It’s the New Republic era. For us, it was a great era because, as much as the new Republic is trying to bring things back, it’s kind of a lawless, wild time, so there’s a lot of danger. If we had set it earlier, the kids would have probably met the Empire and just got shut down. This is more of a galaxy to get lost in.”
The list of directors that worked on Skeleton Crew is also out there by now, and we know that the directing duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, known as the Daniels, directed one of the eight episodes of the show. The directing duo is coming in hot after their massive night at the Oscars where they won Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, and now, the next frame directed by them we’ll be seeing will be set in a galaxy far, far away. When asked about the collaboration with them on Skeleton Crew, Ford and Law said:
FORD: “They would bring a special dynamic to the set. In the morning they would do a special warm-up exercise, they really know how to run a set well.”
LAW: “And this world, this series, had the right amount of elbow room, maneuverability, that each of the directors coming on were able to bring their own perspective. So there’s definitely a flavor of the Daniels as much as there is from everyone else.”
Other directors that worked on the series include co-creator Jon Watts, Bryce Dallas Howard, Lee Isaac Chung, David Lowery, and Jake Schreier. You can check out the entire conversation inside the hour-long podcast here, or watch it on video without the questions, here:
#SkeletonCrew star Jude Law and creator Christopher Ford share why balancing adventure and danger is such a balance for a @StarWars show focused on children characters. https://t.co/JjIFucSURu pic.twitter.com/gj7QK35AsG
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) June 29, 2023
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.
