Lots of Star Wars characters come back from the seemingly certain grave for a lot of reasons, but there are few characters you can say have been saved by an entire medium like animation saved Darth Maul. Thirteen years after Maul—two separate parts of Maul, really—fell into the abyss in Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars did more than just bring the character back as a familiar face; it made Maul an actual character, one whose rebirth would add layers of nuance and interest to a figure who had largely existed in 1999 to look cool and sell action figures.
Fourteen years on from that return, we’ve seen Maul live, thrive, stumble, and eventually fall seemingly for good one last time. He’s gone back to the big screen; he’s driven not one but two Star Wars animated series to their dramatic, emotional climaxes. And now, next week, he is ready to enter the spotlight on his own terms in Maul: Shadow Lord—where we meet Maul and the voice who has helped shape and drive his character for over a decade, Star Wars superfan Sam Witwer, at a very different time in his life.
“If there were ever a time to visit this character’s life, it is exactly when the Empire comes to power, because Maul is a classically trained Force user who came from a time of knights, and honor, and magic, and color,” Witwer recently reflected with io9 over Zoom. “But now the knights are dead, and the magic and the color is being sucked out of the galaxy by the evil galactic empire. And whose empire is that? The Emperor’s.”
Shadow Lord is set shortly after the events of Revenge of the Sith—with Maul still fresh from the wounds he endured on Mandalore from his battles with both his master and Ahsoka Tano, and still fresh in his career as the head of a criminal syndicate. But despite those defeats still lingering, for Witwer, the show is a chance to really see Maul on a mission with personal stakes, one rooted in that feeling of betrayal left by his first death in The Phantom Menace.
“Who is the Emperor to Maul? That’s the man who raised him,” Witwer continued, possessed with a passion for his character typically reserved for people who go on Wookieepedia deep dives as a daily enrichment activity (it would not be that much of a surprise to believe Witwer does exactly that). “So [in Shadow Lord], Maul is looking around going, ‘Okay, I knew that we were trying to build an empire. I didn’t think it was going to be like this. This is grotesque. This is ugly. The only thing that exists here are naked grants for power, and wealth, and influence, and not even—I mean, influence for what? In service to what?'”
“There’s a black hole of energy everywhere, and it’s all everywhere he looks: the Emperor’s hand. So Maul is trying to figure out who he is, and what is he going to do about this?”
What Maul is going to do about this is be his own man for once. The Maul we’ve seen in his animated iterations so far has largely been driven by the whims of forces around him—especially in Clone Wars, where his return was part of the machinations of both the Nightsisters of his homeworld Dathomir and came with the rise of his brother Savage Opress. In Shadow Lord, Maul flies solo.
“He’s been out there, yes, he had his brother, Savage, but he was doing what the Emperor had trained him to do back then,” Witwer added. “Now he’s not. Now he’s coming up with his own ideas.”
Except Maul isn’t as alone in Shadow Lord as you might first think. While the series catches up with members of his nascent Shadow Collective, Maul’s real foil in the series isn’t really the agents of the Empire or his former master but a young Jedi survivor, Devon Izara (voiced in the show by Gideon Adlon). A padawan fleeing the aftermath of Order 66, Devon quickly becomes one of Shadow Lord‘s most intriguing characters, for both the audience and Maul.
“As he is reassessing everything in his life, he encounters a character that reminds him of himself. He feels a need to perhaps connect with [Devon], but he doesn’t really understand what that is. He wasn’t trained to understand what that is. [Maul] is a character who has social needs like you and me but has none of the social training, not even a concept of what it is to be kind to someone. He’s a character who has a lot of internal drama inside him, a lot of conflict, and a lot of tension with Devon.”
But for as intrigued as Maul is by Devon, audiences can expect anything but a typical master-apprentice relationship between the duo.
“Yeah, you can say ‘pawn,'” Witwer laughed when asked about Maul’s view of Devon. “Again, I think that Maul was confused as to what she could or could not be. Certainly though, he understands that in order to combat the Empire, he does need people with extraordinary talent and ability. And for that reason, boy, he could sure use a Jedi or two out there—and note that I used the word ‘use’; he could sure use a Jedi or two in combating the Empire.”
“Which is a really interesting place for him to be, because he was taught by the Emperor to hate them with no compromises, and now he’s questioning everything the Emperor ever told him,” Witwer continued. “Where he lands morally on the spectrum is still a very dangerous place because everything he knew he learned from the Emperor. He does not live in a world where you can have friendships or trust; he does not live in a world where you can stop and reflect and think—there’s no time for that; you’ll be killed. He’s constantly in a state of fight or flight; he’s constantly in a high-cortisol-intense chase through the galaxy. But he’s also very, very smart, very clever, and has a lot of talent.”
It’s in this headspace of different pushes and pulls of desires—carving his own path, defeating his master, and using, potentially even corrupting, this young child—that Witwer finds new ground to play with in a character he’s now seen the ins and outs of for the best part of two decades.
“When you’re doing a show like Clone Wars or Rebels, you’re not the point-of-view character, so you can’t really indulge in a lot of those things—you can hint at them for sure, but you can’t really take the time to really explore,” Witwer mused. “Shadow Lord gives us the luxury of doing just that with this character, which is a tricky thing to do in a Star Wars show, because Star Wars, I firmly believe, is a very moral mythology. And I don’t think any of us had a taste to do a show where a guy is just going around hurting people—you know, that’s just a little bit of a bummer.”
“But a conflicted character, surrounded by a variety of characters across the entire moral spectrum, including some characters who are very, very good—boy, that is an interesting show, if you can pull that off.”
Time will tell if that’s the case, but if there’s anyone in this galaxy ready for it, it’s Witwer. “Hopefully people feel like we’ve pulled that off,” the actor concluded. “It’s been a real challenge.”
Maul: Shadow Lord begins streaming on Disney+ April 6.
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