Dave Filoni reflects on Maul’s journey through live-action and animated Star Wars movies and shows, as he explains in a new interview with Esquire how he approached bringing a man literally too angry to die into one of the most surprisingly nuanced story arcs in the franchise, and how Maul: Shadow Lord serves as a crucial chapter in his perpetual journey of anger, hate, and suffering.
As he was exploring Star Wars in a television format to make The Clone Wars, George Lucas realized that there was still potentially a story to tell with Darth Maul. He tasked Dave Filoni to come up with such a story, as Filoni explained:
“Maul was a character that George wanted to bring back in Clone Wars. And I thought that’d be very difficult — since he cut him in half. But he was very confident that I would find a way to make that justifiable. At the end of the day, people like that character, so they kind of will it back into existence, as long as it comes back in a form that they enjoy. In Clone Wars, he thinks he can prove himself and then return to his rightful place at the side of the Emperor. He thinks he can become this guy again, and that the Emperor was wrong.”
Moving forward into the end of his arc in The Clone Wars and now Shadow Lord, Filoni explained Maul’s main driving force, which perfectly fits into a sci-fi twist on the gangster narrative:
“Maul is afraid, and power is the only way that he knows to really overcome this fear of his. This fear of being insignificant, of being forgotten, of being a nothing. Maul is just a fallen person; he’s put his own needs and greed ahead of everything else, his desire for power and revenge, and that’s what drives him.”
Series head writer and executive producer Matt Michnovetz states that Maul learns lots of lessons over the course of the new series, but his arc is still built on the tragic traits established in The Clone Wars and reinforced with his ending in Rebels, which takes place much later in the timeline:
“He’s this kind of tragic figure who is constantly doomed to repeat his mistakes. We have some empathy for him, but he’s a bad figure. His moral judgment is not the best. He’s determined to achieve his goals through whatever means necessary: manipulation, devious tactics, cruelty in some cases. But he’s a survivor.”
Maul voice actor Sam Witwer has the following to say about Maul’s next course of action:
“He’s reassessing what he needs to do to get back on the map, how to get back onto the galactic stage. He needs to reassert his dominance and his ability to be taken seriously. All the people that were supposed to be there for him, where they were all going to insulate each other from the changes in the coming Empire, they were not there for him, so now he must go around and maybe teach a few people a few lessons, which he feels he has to do if he’s ever going to be taken seriously.”
Filoni closes out the piece by stating that, since Maul’s story as a tragic villain is a cyclic one, Maul’s actions have a pretty big ripple effect that affects the galaxy at large in ways that he couldn’t begin to imagine, while Maul’s selfish actions drive both his higher criminal highs and lower moral lows:
“All of these evil things and all these selfish things scale. It starts out small and it seems petty, but it quickly becomes a fulfillment of desire. If you took something that gives you power, it makes you feel better than somebody else, but it also makes you feel bad because somewhere, inherently, you know it’s wrong, what you did. So in order to quash that feeling of remorse, you have to do it again. And again, to get the fix of thriving and gaining power and suppressing other people. And it becomes this way of being — and that’s the Dark Side of the Force.”
Maul: Shadow Lord will begin airing on Disney Plus starting on April 6, 2026. The first season of the show is 10 episodes long that will air in groups of two through May 4, and a second season has been ordered. The show’s cast includes Sam Witwer as Maul, Gideon Adlon as Devon Izara, Wagner Moura as Brander Lawson, Richard Ayoade as Two-Boots, Dennis Haysbert as Master Eeko-Dio-Daki, Chris Diamantopoulos as Looti Vario, Charlie Bushnell as Rylee Lawson, Vanessa Marshall as Rook Kast, David W. Collins as Spybot, A. J. LoCascio as Marrok, and Steve Blum as Icarus.
In a social media post, we highlighted how the series “is as enjoyable as Star Wars animation has ever been”. Our full review will be posted on Monday.
Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.