In the lead-up to the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, director Jon Favreau has been very explicit about his desire for the film to stand apart from The Mandalorian TV show. He wanted to tell a story that you could follow even if you hadn’t seen the three seasons of television that preceded it. Even though it is in many ways a continuation of the TV show, Favreau wanted The Mandalorian and Grogu to stand on its own. That’s why, he told Entertainment Weekly, two beloved Star Wars characters don’t appear in the movie.
Favreau spoke to EW about why Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) don’t appear in The Mandalorian and Grogu. He said, “It’s not always about character crossovers, I’ll say that. It’s about the characters and what they’re experiencing. We brought Ahsoka into The Mandalorian originally because she would be a great character to explain [to] Grogu a bit more about his history. So when we find the right reason to have characters intersect, we definitely do it.”
In the series, Ahsoka is the one who identifies Grogu and, crucially, reveals his name after Din Djarin, aka the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), spends a season and a half wandering the desert with the troublesome baby in tow, so it’s no surprise that fans would be hopeful to see her in the film, too. Thrawn, though, was always a long shot. He’s got strong ties to Ahsoka, having appeared in season one of the Ahsoka TV show, but fewer to The Mandalorian; he’s mentioned twice but never appears onscreen.
“When we were discussing doing a fourth season of [The Mandalorian], which was put on hold, and then the idea of doing a theatrical presentation… It changed the way we approached how interconnected things should be,” Favreau said. “A fourth season of a show would have assumed that you saw three seasons previously and, frankly, everything else on Disney+. That’s the nature of a serialized long-form TV story.”
But, you may be asking, then why would Favreau include Zeb Orrelios (Steve Blum) from Star Wars Rebels and Embo from Star Wars: The Clone Wars? He’s got an answer for that, too: “I think somebody who’s never seen Zeb before totally gets it and thinks he’s cool, too. So that’s where we’re looking for the Venn diagram where those things overlap, and that’s a good example.”
The Mandalorian and Grogu is in theaters now.
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