Disney Plus’ Lego Star Wars special, Rebuild the Galaxy, puts a new spin on the galaxy far, far away. The basic gist of these four half-hour episodes is that one Force-sensitive boy accidentally rewires reality, swapping all the characters’ roles. This means, among other funky shifts, Luke Skywalker is now a beach bum, Jar Jar is a Sith Lord, and Ewoks are the most fearsome bounty hunters in the galaxy. There are dozens of cameos from across Star Wars history — and plenty of actors reprising their roles with a new spin.
“It was basically universal excitement,” co-showrunner Benji Samit told Polygon during a press day, when asked how the legacy actors reacted to the fresh takes on their characters. “You got some of these actors, like Mark [Hamill] or Anthony [Daniels], [who] have been doing it for 40-plus years, and it’s always been more or less the same version of the characters. Which they love, obviously, but I think it was really fun and refreshing for everyone to do a new spin on their characters.”
“And that extends also to people like Ahmed Best,” added co-showrunner Dan Hernandez. “My appreciation for his performance and the characterization of Jar Jar Binks has only exponentially grown over this process. He came into it; he started improv-ing. He had the voice, he had the mannerisms, he had everything down so perfectly that we just kind of said, Let him cook, because he’s got it!”
Rebuild the Galaxy also gave characters with minor roles in the movies more access to the spotlight. Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran), for instance, gets to be a Sith Lord, while Rise of Skywalker’s underused character Jannah (Naomi Ackie) is now on the Jedi Council. Hernandez and Samit told us it was exciting to spend more time with those characters, and that the actors were almost universally gung-ho — even if some them took a little time to figure out the nuances of their new roles.
“Sam [Witwer], who plays Maul, that was a really different version of that character,” Hernandez laughed. In Rebuild the Galaxy, Darth Maul isn’t a menacing villain; he’s a total sweetheart and Rebel ally. “At first, he had to really think about, OK, how am I going to calibrate it? In the end, he’s so funny and so charming, and you would not have expected it from someone who is used to playing it very straightforward, very evil. It just goes to show you what an incredible performer he is, but also that we make assumptions about people, and they’re not always right. That’s one of the points of this special, to challenge what we think we know about these characters, and what we think we know about Lego Star Wars.”
Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is out now on Disney Plus.
