‘Harry Potter’ star voices ‘The Mandalorian’s Anzellans

It’s likely that fans of The Mandalorian are going to have a new obsession pretty soon. Episode one of the brand new season was the series debut for the Anzellans, a race first encountered in The Rise of Skywalker. The Anzellans are expert droid smiths, and if they sound familiar, it might be because you heard their voice in a very different fandom. To be specific, you might have heard her moaning in the second-floor girls’ bathroom of Hogwarts.

The miniature mechanics are all voiced by Scottish actress Shirley Henderson, who portrayed the ghost of Myrtle Warren aka “Moaning” Myrtle in the second and fourth Harry Potter movies. And yes, she also voiced the first Anzellan to be seen in the Star Wars Galaxy, Babu Frik, who repaired the droid  EV-6B6 for Zorii Bliss, and Poe Dameron in the final installment of the sequel trilogy.

While voicing an entire race of aliens for the franchise may seem like a tall order for any actor, Henderson was not only the best choice but the perfect choice, as she helped originate the species’ language and even their movement. Henderson even learned puppetry for her role as Frik, “so she could improv and actually move the character’s mouth,” as TROS sound editor Matthew Wood told The Hollywood Reporter. “She was puppeteering while she was doing the improv for the character. She came up with that language and performed it that way. We preserved all of her production sounds, and that was entirely shot on set, live, with her own movement.”

Henderson is an accomplished actor who’s appeared in Trainspotting, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, but she’s also becoming something of a fantasy and Sci-Fi queen. She’ll be joining another favorite franchise when she appears as Tula Harkonnen in the upcoming Dune spinoff TV series Dune: The Sisterhood.