‘The Mandalorian’ Casts Pedro Pascal as Lead
Via Vanity Fair:
A new collection of Star Wars-themed TV shows is just one component of Disney’s larger effort to go toe-to-toe with Netflix in the streaming-content department. The studio and its many subsidiaries, including Lucasfilm, Marvel, and Pixar, will soon be encouraging their various fan bases to follow them to a new streaming platform, called Disney+— and as Disney pursues big-budget all-media domination, it seems to be following a path established by HBO’s juggernaut Game of Thrones.
After making Emilia Clarke a pivotal part of the Han Solo prequel and snapping up Thrones show-runners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff to helm a new series of Star Wars films, Variety reports that the studio has now chosen Thrones fan-favorite Pedro Pascal to play the titular role in Jon Favreau’s highly anticipated Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian. Familiar Thrones faces have been popping up in Star Wars films for some time now due to the fact that one woman, Nina Gold, casts both. And thanks to an early promo photo, we already know what the former Prince Oberyn Martell will look like in full battle gear. Should be a rather familiar look for fans of the bounty hunter Boba Fett.
Pascal will not be playing a version of Fett, though Favreau has not been shy about alluding to the popular original trilogy character when pitching his new series. “After the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Warsuniverse,” reads the official synopsis posted by Favreau. “The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic . . . . ”
A “lone gunfighter” isn’t that far off from the solitary sword-slingers who wander the dangerous countryside of Westeros. (George R.R. Martin’s hedge knights, George Lucas’s Jedi, and Akira Kurosawa’s Ronin all come from the same storytelling well.) But perhaps the best news for fans of Pascal and his short-lived tenure on Thrones is the shot that Favreau posted of the elegant weapon slung across his lead character’s back.
Pascal fans who have long been waiting for him to find something that capitalizes on the full strength of his charisma may finally be in luck. Not to knock Narcos, but Pascal’s incredibly tense Netflix series hasn’t exactly proved a natural draw for the built-in genre fandom of Thrones. Lovers of Pascal’s flamboyant Dornish Prince Oberyn may find, however, that the galaxy far, far away is really just an idealogical hop, skip, and jump away from Westeros.
According to The New York Times, The Mandalorian will be operating on a similar budgetary scale to that of Thrones. At a budget of $100 million for the first 10-episode season, Favreau’s special-effects-heavy series will outstrip the $90 million HBO is putting up for Weiss and Benioff to deliver the six final episodes of Thrones.
The Mandalorian is expected to debut in late 2019.
