The Mandalorian: Cast, trailer, plot, release date and more Star Wars details

Who needs Jedi? Long-awaited live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian is coming to the Disney Plus streaming service, and it’s a name with deep roots in the franchise’s history and links to the insanely cool armor worn by bounty hunter Boba Fett.

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Disney unveiled a new poster during D23. 


Disney/Lucasfilm

Pedro Pascal (best known for playing Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones) will play the title role — a lone Mandalorian gunfighter operating in the outer reaches of the galaxy. 

The show will debut when Disney Plus launches on Nov. 12, and executive producer Jon Favreau said he’s already writing season 2. 

We’re expecting some more details, and maybe even a trailer, at Disney’s biannual D23 convention, this weekend. The company whet our appetites Friday by tweeting a cool new poster showing the Mandalorian walking away from his ship with a binary sunset and some Sandcrawlers in the background, on a planet that looks a lot like Tatooine.

Pascal will be joined by Giancarlo Esposito (who played Gus Fring in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul); MMA fighter and Deadpool actress Gina CaranoEmily Swallow from SupernaturalCarl Weathers of Rocky and Predator fame; Down and Out in Beverly Hills actor Nick Nolte; Omid Abtahi from American Gods; Agents of SHIELD’s Ming-Na Wen; and Werner Herzog (who directed and narrated Grizzly Man).

Only a few characters have been revealed so far, including Carano’s ex-rebel shock trooper Cara Dune and Weathers’ Greef Carga. Wen’s casting announcement came early during D23, where more news and a trailer played to audiences.

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Pedro Pascal will play the show’s lead role.


Gabriel Maseda/NurPhoto via Getty Images

At Star Wars Celebration Chicago in April, Pascal said the Mandalorian is “a mysterious lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy. Some might say he has questionable moral character.”

The Mandalorian will work closely with Carga.

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Carl Weathers plays Greef Carga.


Lucasfilm

“He’s kinda the head of this guild of bounty hunters,” Weathers revealed at Star Wars Celebration. “The Mando is a guy who he figures can get the job done.”

The Celebration Chicago panel also revealed that Esposito plays an Imperial officer (or possibly a former Imperial, given the show’s timeframe), Herzog’s character is some sort of crime boss and Abtahi’s is a doctor.

The Star Wars underworld is a very rich storytelling environment, according to Favreau. He wanted to get back to the tone of the old western and samurai films that inspired George Lucas, and says the show will be Star Wars meets Mad Max.  

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Gina Carano is playing Cara Dune.


Lucasfilm

The Mandalorian is one of three shows set in a galaxy far, far away coming to the Disney Plus streaming service. The company announced the seventh season of The Clone Wars over the summer and a Rogue One prequel series focusing on rebel spy Cassian Andor on Nov. 9.

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Pedro Pascal as the Mandalorian.


Lucasfilm

It’s likely to be the streaming service’s biggest draw, even if it’s 20 years too late for some of us. We’ll keep this guide updated with all the juicy details for you to gobble up like a hungry sarlacc. 

What else do we know?

Lucasfilm has steadily drip-fed information about the show since Favreau was announced as its writer and executive producer. It’s not his first Star Wars rodeo. He voiced Pre Vizsla — the violent leader of a Mandalorian splinter group — in The Clone Wars and played pilot Rio Durant in Solo: A Star Wars Story.

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Boba Fett wears Mandalorian armor, but isn’t a true Mandalorian.


Lucasfilm

In summer 2018, Favreau revealed that the show will be set seven years after Return of the Jedi (so six years after the Empire’s final defeat at the Battle of Jakku and 23 years before The Force Awakens) and will focus on all-new characters. We also have a New York Times report that its 10 episodes will enjoy a $100 million budget, which was the rumored cost of Westworld’s first season.

Actor Giancarlo Esposito plays Gus in the new movie Breaking Bad.

Giancarlo Esposito, best known for playing the big bad of Breaking Bad, will be in the show.


Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Directors for some of the episodes:

Favreau, Filoni, Colin Wilson and Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy will be the executive producers. Karen Gilchrist will be co-executive producer.

Since announcing the show’s name, Favreau dropped a few hints and updates on Instagram. He revealed a rifle that’ll be familiar to fans of the infamously bad Star Wars Holiday Special where Boba Fett made his first appearance in 1978.

Favreau also shared a photo of a prop that looks a whole lot like that ice cream maker-like can carried by cult Empire Strikes Back character Willrow Hood — perhaps an effort to highlight the show’s attention to classic Star Wars detail.

The Mandalorian will be among the first projects for ILM TV, the newly announced TV division of Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic visual effects company. It’ll be run from a new studio in London.

The show’s soundtrack will be composed by Ludwig Göransson, who scored Black Panther, Venom and Creed II. Göransson’s Black Panther score won him a Grammy on Feb. 10 and an Oscar on Feb. 25.

“In these next months I hope to honor the tradition of Star Wars’ musical landscape while propelling The Mandalorian into new and unchartered territory,” he said in a statement posted to StarWars.com. “And I will try to remember that there is no try.”

On Dec. 25, Favreau gave fans a Christmas present in the form of a shot featuring bounty hunter IG-88 against a green screen. 

You might remember IG-88 as one of the bounty hunters seen on Darth Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in The Empire Strikes Back as the Sith Lord tasked them with tracking down the Millennium Falcon.

The Favreau droid parade continued in the Jan. 29 shot of R5-D4, an astromech who played a small but pivotal role in A New Hope. You might remember him as the droid Uncle Owen initially agreed to buy from the Jawas, until a bad motivator resulted in him taking R2-D2 instead.

We got a hint about the show’s tone on Feb. 4, when director Taika Waititi mentioned after a Television Critics Association panel that it’ll be similar to the original trilogy and that he had to curb the signature comedic instincts he used in Thor: Ragnarok as he directed an episode of the show.

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Taika Waititi decided he couldn’t “put too many jokes” into the episode of The Mandalorian he directed.


Stefania D’Alessandro/WireImage

“Star Wars, you know, is just very different to the Marvel style,” he said. “They know that whatever was set up in the tone of the first films really should be kind of adhered to and that’s what the fans like and you can’t really disrespect it, I guess, is a nice way of saying it. Can’t have too many jokes, but there’s a little bit. Definitely my tone is in there, with the dialogue and stuff like that.”

He also mentioned working on “scenes with like 50 or 60” Stormtroopers.

On Feb. 15, (the same day Episode 9 finished its shoot) crew members reportedly posted on social media that the first season of The Mandalorian had wrapped production. The posts were apparently deleted, but it was the first indication that we’ve had that the show wasn’t just a limited series.

What’s a Mandalorian?

They’re humans from the Outer Rim world of Mandalore, its moon Concordia and the planet Kalevala, whose story was largely told in The Clone Wars and Rebels.

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Jango Fett claimed to be from the Mandalorian world of Concord Dawn.


Dark Horse Comics/Lucasfilm

Their world went through major political upheaval during the Clone Wars and early days of the Galactic Empire’s rule, but many of the clans united under the rule of Bo-Katan Kryze after she took control of the Darksaber. The black-bladed weapon was created more than 1,000 years earlier by Tarre Vizsla (the first Mandalorian to join the Jedi Order) and became a symbol of leadership.

You probably associate bounty hunters Boba Fett and Jango Fett with the term because they wear the cool armor, but they aren’t true Mandalorians. Jango once claimed to be from Concord Dawn, a Mandalorian world, but the government considered him (and by extension, his cloned son Boba) to be pretenders.

Who could be wearing the armor in this new show?

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One of the side stories in the Aftermath trilogy could hint at the identity of a character in the show.


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Fans have been clamoring for Boba’s return to the Star Wars galaxy despite his fall into the maw of a hungry sarlacc in Return of the Jedi, but there’s been no indication that will happen. Kennedy recently confirmed that his much-rumored solo movie is100 percent dead,” but that could pave the way for his dramatic return in The Mandalorian.

Fans of the Legends material (developed in novels, comics and games prior to 2014) will recall that Boba escaped the sarlacc in that continuity and went on to become the leader of Mandalore in a very different post-Return of the Jedi galaxy.

In Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy of novels, Mandalorian armor that’s heavily implied to be Boba’s is recovered from the pit and worn by former slave Cobb Vanth. Using the armor as a symbol of power, he becomes sheriff of Freetown (a settlement on Tatooine) and offers sanctuary to anyone willing to battle the world’s crime syndicates.

The character we’ve seen could be Cobb — the area in the first official Mandalorian photo certainly looks like it could be Tatooine — but his armor is much better shape than Boba’s would be; the helmet should be dented and the whole set should show signs of acid damage from its time in the sarlacc. He could’ve cleaned it up, but surely acid marks don’t come out that easily.

Which characters are likely to appear?

We probably won’t see any major characters from the movies, since the actors who play the main human characters aren’t the right ages and they most likely won’t be explored in-depth until after Episode 9 is released on Dec. 20, 2019.

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However, we might see characters from the CGI animated series. Sabine Wren from Rebels is a Mandalorian. That show was set before A New Hope, but it ended with a flash-forward to a point after Return of the Jedi. We saw Sabine embarking on a quest with former Jedi Ahsoka Tano to find the lost Ezra Bridger.

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Sabine Wren (seen wielding the Darksaber) could appear in the show.


Lucasfilm

That’s highly speculative, but it’d be amazing to see Sabine (and maybe Ahsoka) in live action for the first time. It’s unlikely to be the show’s main narrative thrust since it’d demand that viewers have a certain level of foreknowledge prior to starting The Mandalorian.

One of the announced cast members, Omid Abtahi, was the voice actor for Mandalorian cadet Amis in two episodes of The Clone Wars, as noted by the Ion Cannon podcast. Given that the Celebration Chicago panel revealed he’s playing a doctor, it seems unlikely that he’s bringing his role from the CGI animated show into live action (which would be a cool link between the Mandalorians of the prequel era and the time following Return of the Jedi).

What other stories could they draw from?

Star Wars 1313 was a video game that got shelved when Disney shut down all projects at LucasArts — Lucasfilm’s game development group — in 2013. We saw an impressive demo for Uncharted-style adventure before that, featuring actor Wilson Bethel (who recently hit the target in Daredevil season 3).

It would’ve seen players exploring the bowels of the city planet Coruscant — the title was a reference to its grimy underworld Level 1313 (which later appeared in The Clone Wars).

After it was canceled, we found out that Boba Fett was going to be the star and that Kennedy later agreed the concept art was “unbelievable.”

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“So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold,” she told Slashfilm in 2015. “And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”

In that same interview, Kennedy noted that Lucasfilm read through the material Lucas developed for canceled TV show Star Wars: Underworld, which was announced in 2005 and canned in 2010 due to budget constraints. It was to be set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and would have tied into 1313.

This story first published on Nov. 14, 2018, and will be updated regularly.