An early clue that The Mandalorian was going to be something special was its casting. Season 1 boasted Nick Nolte, Carl Weathers, Taika Waititi, Gina Carano, Clancy Brown, Bill Burr, Giancarlo Esposito and, the cherry on top, Werner Herzog. Some of these actors will be returning for the second season as well, though many of them didn’t make it through the show’s occasionally brutal first run.
It’s looking like the series is set to keep up its note-perfect casting, too, as last week it was announced that Aliens and The Terminator star Michael Biehn would be stepping into a galaxy far, far away. There’s been no official announcement as to who Biehn’s playing, through the rumor mill suggests that he’ll be a “bounty hunter from the Mando’s past.” This description fits about 75% of the show’s cast, so it doesn’t narrow things down much. After all, as we saw in the first season, the Mandalorian has gotten around the galaxy quite a bit, making friends and (more often) enemies along the way.
But now, MakingStarWars.com have shared a sketch that they claim depicts the rough design of Biehn’s character, and you can check it out below:
It’s an interesting design, to be sure, and is clearly supposed to be reminiscent of a samurai warrior. This makes sense for Star Wars, with George Lucas being open about how the saga was influenced by Kurosawa movies (and specifically by the 1958 film The Hidden Fortress). Of course, Vader’s armor is designed to look vaguely samurai-shaped, too, and this certainly seems to follow that trend. It also bears a resemblance to other Imperial armor, more specifically Han Solo’s Imperial outfit as seen in the (cut) Mimban battle scene in Solo.
So, many are concluding that Biehn’s character may be some kind of grizzled ex-Imperial special forces. But given that we got a bunch of those in season 1 of The Mandalorian, I’m hoping there’s an interesting twist to this mysterious individual.
