Star Wars Rebels: Director Shares Details on Thrawn
This weekend at Star Wars Celebration in London, England, Lucasfilm, Disney XD and series showrunner Dave Filoni for Star Wars Rebels unveiled a pretty huge reveal. The longtime fan-favorite character Grand Admiral Thrawn will appear in the for the upcoming third season. Thrawn is a famous Imperial officer who first appeared in Star Wars Expanded Universe books in the early 1990s written by Timothy Zahn. However, when Disney bought the Star Wars film franchise and opted to revise the continuity, a new revised canon was established. As a result, most material from the Expanded Universe was re-dubbed as the “Legends” canon. However, Star Wars creators would still have the option to pluck material from the Legends canon as they saw fit. Now Thrawn will finally be realized in a full motion picture format.
Speaking at the Star Wars Rebels panel at Celebration (via IGN), supervising director Filoni talked about Thrawn’s appearance in the upcoming third season. Regarding how much of a threat Thrawn will be, he stated: “You are cautious on a weekly series to put them into a ‘Oh, he lost again!’ [situation]. You can’t play him that way. He’s way too smart…If Vader is around all the time, he’s just gonna take our guys out…There’s no one to defend them against Thrawn. We want to treat him like a big time villain, as much as Darth Vader, but on the strategic, military side of things.”
He added on wanting to use Thrawn, “It was definitely something that had been thought about for a long time at Lucasfilm…Thrawn was always on the list.”
Lars Mikkelsen will be the voice of Thrawn for the series. Star Wars Rebels Season 3 debuts later this fall on Disney XD.