Updated With More Pictures: ‘Ahsoka’ Debuts Four New Character Images; Natasha Liu Bordizzo Praises Rosario Dawson’s Dedication and Carrie Beck Recalls Dave Filoni’s Long Journey
The actors may be on strike and prohibited from doing interviews, but that doesn’t mean that major publications haven’t been holding on to big pieces for a while. Entertainment Weekly has published a cover story focused on Ahsoka, 20 days before the series’ two-episode premiere, featuring four new images from the show (though they don’t exactly reveal much) as well as interviews with the main protagonists and executive producer Carrie Beck they did back in late June. (UPDATE: more images revealed after first posting the article, scroll down to see them.)
Beck started as an associate producer in the first two seasons of Star Wars: Rebels, was promoted to producer in season 3, acted as co-executive producer on The Mandalorian, and was now promoted to executive producer in Ahsoka. She has been working with Filoni for years, and she can tell the story now; as she explained it, “He’s telling the story of the student of Anakin, and he himself was a student of George.” Filoni had talked about the long-shot possibility of maybe, one day, doing live-action episodic Star Wars TV, as Beck explained:
“[He] wondered if one day we’d actually be able to make Star Wars in live-action and episodic. It was something we had talked about for years, before making a streaming show was even a possibility.”
The idea is no longer a possibility; it’s a reality. Filoni was brought on board The Mandalorian shortly after Jon Favreau got the thumbs-up from Lucasfilm, and it wasn’t long before he started thinking about how to fold his beloved character into the mix. He saw the light in season 2 and wrote her into a pivotal point for Mando’s journey, with hopes that he would, one day, have the chance to spin her off into her own show.
The casting process didn’t take long. Rosario Dawson claims she was a fan of the character since the days of The Clone Wars, and after her retweeting fan art of her as the beloved Togruta caught Filoni’s attention, she was the first to call. Fast forward to her first day on set (the one when George Lucas’ picture with Grogu broke the Internet, that one), she coulnd’t believe what the mirror was telling her:
“I was literally doing jumping jacks. I remember seeing Jon and Dave’s faces, like, ‘Ooh, did we make the right decision? She’s a little bit… hyped fangirl.'”
But Filoni disagrees with that assessment, as he told Entertainment Weekly at Star Wars Celebration:
“I was very fortunate. The whole thing kind of came together for me with Rosario when we talked with her and when she put on the costume and became Ahsoka. I was like, ‘You know, this is going to work.’ It really was as simple as that.”
The EW piece confirms that the series will pick up after the events of The Book of Boba Fett, but we already know that we will be revisiting some key moments from Star Wars: Rebels in live-action; namely, the moment in the series’ epilogue where she recruits Sabine to go search for Ezra. (We still don’t know exactly where that moment falls in the timeline.) And that is the exact premise of the show. EW hints that Ahsoka’s motivation is to find Thrawn so that he can lead them to Ezra. However, other interviews with the cast differ on this point and instead suggest that Ahsoka’s goal is to find Thrawn, while Sabine’s is to find Ezra.
Going back to the Rebels epilogue, Dave Filoni has been talking for years about the not-so-subtle reference to Gandalf the White that Ahsoka pulls with her look. And yet, the trailer suggests (along with other images that have been revealed) that, in live-action, she will be more of a Gandalf the Grey; Dawson talked about this exact point in her interview:
“In the animation, you saw her go to the white, but what I loved is the idea that there was even another level to her. Dave and I talked a lot about Gandalf the Gray and Gandalf the White — talking about that transition and how she’s someone very capable and excellent and looked up to as a leader, but she still has levels of development to go.”
In that scene, she meets Sabine, who will be revealed in the series to have trained in lightsaber fighting under Ahsoka in between Ezra’s disappearance and the main narrative of Ahsoka. Natasha Liu Bordizzo is picking up the baton from Tiya Sircar in live-action, after landing the role in 2021 submitting just one tape. The Australian-born actress talked to EW about Rosario Dawson’s restless shooting process:
“I don’t have a single memory of her looking tired, which is crazy considering we’re on the same schedule. On the weekends, she’s always doing work for charities that she’s passionate about and flying off and doing speeches at events — and I’m just in bed. And I’m still tired.”
She also talked about how every single movement she makes on the set is studied in detail and is approved or not depending on whether the people behind the camera (namely, the hat-wearing showrunner) think Sabine would actually do that:
“Sometimes you do stunts in projects, and it feels performative or more like it’s for the fun of the action, which is fine. But every action scene in our show is very, very parallel to the story. Every move is thought out, to where they would comment that a certain move did or didn’t feel like Sabine. Everything is intentional, and I hope that shows on screen.”
After 15 years in the @StarWars universe, #Ahsoka is ready to step into the live-action spotlight. Rosario Dawson details her journey from ‘hyped fangirl’ to embodying the former Jedi Padawan in her own series. https://t.co/9Ld9wCy04i Story by @devancoggan pic.twitter.com/smVYv93aXH
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) August 3, 2023
Also making the jump to live-action is Hera Syndulla, played here by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who couldn’t contain her excitement about playing a rebel leader who also comes across as “maternal and nurturing”:
“What I love about her is that she’s such a strong leader and fighter, and she’s also so maternal and nurturing. We don’t often see that depicted on screen. We see army generals being these very masculine, hard figures. And Hera has that, but she also has this softness to her. She really wants her crew to be loved and looked after, and at the same time, she’s pushing them to be better.”
On the opposite side of the fight, we have four main bad guys. Returning from The Mandalorian, Diana Lee Inosanto plays Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth. The actress remembers going to see Star Wars when she was 11 with her father, martial arts legend Dan Inosanto, who immediately after ran out to buy plastic lightsabers to train with his daughter. Said the actress, as she recalled the memory:
“I love the irony that he was training me with these double-staff, plastic lightsabers, and who knew that down the road, I would actually be doing this fight scene with Rosario? Maybe the Force is really out there.”
Working with/for/against(?) her are both Baylan Skoll (the late Ray Stevenson) and Shin Hati (Ivanna Sakhno). When EW spoke to the cast in late June, the former had already passed away, so it was quite an emotional discussion for them. Sakhno, who seems to be her scene partner for a big chunk of the show, said his impact on her life is “immeasurable”, and recalled his jovial attitude on set, singing “Who let the Shin out?” in between takes (a riff on Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out.”) Inosanto added the following:
“Ray really was so excited for this character to be released into the world. He was just an extraordinarily kind human being. I used to call him poetry in motion on the set. He really was walking poetry, and I know I’m going to be thinking about him when we’re watching these episodes.”
Last but not least is, of course, Lars Mikkelsen as Grand Admiral Thrawn. The Danish actor voiced the character for two seasons of Rebels and was apparently on Filoni’s mind to play the live-action part long before Ahsoka was even a thing. The showrunner apparently told Mikkelsen “Let’s see if we can make that happen” when he replied he hadn’t been to L.A. yet. The actor told EW:
“I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. But then, about a year and a half after, he phoned me up, and I was game.”
As Carrie Beck told EW, the main challenge of the series once it comes out on Disney Plus will be to lure in audiences who may not be as familiar with the Star Wars: Rebels lore:
“That’s been the challenge of the series,” Beck admits. “But Dave was very thoughtful about crafting the narrative in a way that could invite people in. The show tells them everything they need to know along the way.”
But the relevance of the character goes well beyond that. Thanks to Tales of the Jedi, we know here Ahsoka’s story started, and we’ve lived through many chapters of her life across the last 15 years. But what happens later? Ashley Eckstein voice-cameoed in The Rise of Skywalker along quite a few long-dead Jedi, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet if Ahsoka has also perished at that point in the timeline. Said Beck:
“There’s always been a big open question. We don’t see her in the original trilogy. We don’t see her in the sequel trilogy. What did she end up doing?”
It’s unlikely that the show will answer the many questions we have about the character post-Return of the Jedi, but it will definitely be a good start. For more, we will have to wait for its already-planned season 2 (which is pending a green light depending on how the first season performs) and probably Dave Filoni’s theatrical movie — though her appearance there is all but inevitable, it hasn’t been confirmed yet.
The first two episodes of Ahsoka start streaming on Disney Plus on August 23. To wrap things up, check out the new (and awesome) banner that the official Star Wars account is now using:
UPDATE: After posting of the article, we noticed that Entertainment Weekly had revealed additional stills from the show on a different link. Check them out below:
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.
