[This story contains spoilers for Ahsoka.]
Ahsoka star Eman Esfandi called his own shot.
When Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano first appeared in live-action on The Mandalorian season two and voiced her intention to find the villainous Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), Ezra Bridger’s own jump to live-action immediately became a near-inevitability for die-hard Star Wars fans. The already-great odds increased even more when Dawson’s spinoff series, Ahsoka, was announced shortly thereafter in December 2020, with longtime Star Wars creator and George Lucas apprentice Dave Filoni at the helm. This meant that Filoni would likely introduce not only Ezra and Thrawn into the live-action fold, but also plenty more of his beloved animated characters from the likes of Star Wars Rebels and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
As a result, the role of the long-lost Jedi, Ezra, became one of the most coveted parts in town, and six months before the casting process even started, Esfandi told his representatives how things would play out.
“I emailed my agent and manager six months prior to my audition and was like, ‘Hey, when they cast for Ezra Bridger, I’m going to play him. So use these pictures,’” Esfandi tells The Hollywood Reporter.
When a cryptic audition came up six months later for a character named “Riz,” Esfandi and his team quickly decoded that it was for Ezra. And similar to his co-star Natasha Liu Bordizzo and her live-action take on the animated character of Sabine Wren, Esfandi was cast off his self-tape alone that included at least one Top Gun scene. So he fulfilled his own prophecy from six months earlier in a rather streamlined process.
At the end of Star Wars Rebels, Ezra sacrificed everything to keep Thrawn, and himself by extension, trapped in another galaxy where the evil Grand Admiral could be neutralized. Consequently, Ezra missed out on all the events of the original Star Wars trilogy. So, upon Ezra and Sabine’s dramatic reunion on Ahsoka, Esfandi and Bordizzo would eventually have a scene during the seventh episode where Sabine brings Ezra up to speed on everything that happened during his extended absence. The added wrinkle to their exchange is that Sabine was also updating Esfandi himself on everything he’d overlooked so far.
“I wasn’t a Star Wars person before the show. I just didn’t grow up on it. But after we shot the show, I inhaled all of it for six months,” Esfandi admits. “So, when Sabine was filling Ezra in, I also didn’t know much about it. Once I got to know everything, it just made that scene twice as funny. I was like, ‘Oh my God, that was how they filled Ezra in? » …
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