{"id":509118,"date":"2026-04-02T15:06:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T15:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/509118\/"},"modified":"2026-04-02T15:06:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T15:06:15","slug":"he-wants-revenge-for-everything-an-inside-look-at-new-star-wars-spin-off-maul-shadow-lord","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/509118\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHe Wants Revenge for Everything”: An Inside Look At New Star Wars Spin-Off ‘Maul: Shadow Lord’"},"content":{"rendered":"

They say you can\u2019t keep a good man down. But in the Star Wars universe, being exceptionally bad is another path to longevity.<\/p>\n

That lack of redemption has been the salvation of the demon-faced Darth Maul, who keeps turning up despite dying a lot over the years. Well, seemingly dying. His latest revival comes in the new animated series Maul: Shadow Lord, a galactic take on the old-school gangster genre, which debuts its first two episodes on Disney+ on Monday, April 6. A second season of the show is already in the works, series creator and newly installed Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni tells Esquire. So consider this just the opening chapter in Maul\u2019s underworld rise and fall. He\u2019ll come back. He always does.<\/p>\n

But what is it about this evil being that makes Maul so intriguing? \u201cIt\u2019s not any one thing,\u201d says Filoni, who credits Maul\u2019s fan-favourite status to his frightening visage: hypnotic black tattoos on an inferno-red face, topped with a crown of horns. He also notes that Maul pioneered a new dynamic fighting style with his spinning double-bladed lightsaber. Then there\u2019s the fact that his backstory was full of blank spots that begged to be filled in. Maul was an enigma from the get-go, much like Darth Vader when he first stalked across the screen in 1977, and as with that original Star Wars antagonist, fans have never stopped yearning for more.<\/p>\n

We love survivors. But is Maul fascinating because of his resilience\u2014or because of the unfairness he perpetually endures? The ancient myth the Shadow Lord creative team repeatedly invokes as a comparison is Sisyphus, who lives forever but is doomed to push the same rock up a hill over and over and over again. Survivors are appealing, yes. But we are also transfixed by people who are their own worst enemies.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaul 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,\u201d Filoni says.<\/p>\n

Fans already know how Maul\u2019s story ends. (More on that later.) So we already have that bookend in place. That means the only certainty is that he will fail and fail again. Unless you count becoming the biggest nothing in the galaxy as success.<\/p>\n

\"Maul:Disney+\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

Is Maul fascinating because of his resilience\u2014or because of the unfairness he perpetually endures?<\/p>\n

The most memorable Star Wars characters all stand for something bigger than themselves. They can feel like real people\u2014complicated, confused, and at times full of contradictions\u2014but they\u2019re also archetypes. Luke Skywalker is the prototypical hero, a symbol of hope. Leia manifests strength and persistence. Han Solo is walking, talking skepticism in a vest. Ahsoka Tano could be seen as idealism personified. Darth Vader looms as the ultimate cautionary tale about the corruption of good intentions. Maul, if we\u2019re following this line, is a symbol of betrayal.<\/p>\n

He was trained in the ways of the Dark Side as a child by the future Emperor Palpatine, only to be casually discarded by this so-called caregiver when he fell short. During his debut appearance in 1999\u2019s The Phantom Menace, Maul (played by Ray Park) was all flash and intimidation. He succeeded in killing the Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) but failed in his overall mission when Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) sliced him in half and hurled him down into a reactor core.<\/p>\n

Fans felt Maul never got to live up to his promise. George Lucas, as it turns out, felt that way too. The Star Wars mastermind also wanted more from Maul, which is why he urged Filoni to devise a way to bring him back when they worked together on the 2008\u20132013 animated series The Clone Wars. George went looking for Maul and brought him back. That\u2019s more concern than the Emperor ever showed for his lost apprentice.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to remember this guy was an athlete training for the Olympics and then he never got to go. Or rather, on his first Olympic trials, he botched the landing, right?\u201d says actor Sam Witwer, who has voiced Maul ever since The Clone Wars first resurrected the character in 2012. \u201cHe\u2019s the guy who peaked too early and is thinking, Oh, I could have been and I should have been\u2026 And if he were more wise, he would be able to figure out a way through that. But unfortunately, he was not trained to have that reflectivity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Maul was trained to lash out. So that\u2019s what he\u2019s always done\u2014and is still doing, albeit in a different way. When Star Wars fans first met Maul, he literally got the shaft. Everybody knows what that\u2019s like, which is fertile ground for storytelling.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, people like that character,\u201d Filoni says of Maul. \u201cSo they kind of will it back into existence, as long as it comes back in a form that they enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the video above shows, Maul hasn\u2019t had an easy time. With each new iteration, he tries a new scheme to return to prominence, but the one consistency about him is that he always chooses darkness. Maybe that\u2019s why he never gets what he wants. \u201cWhen you keep losing and losing, you lose hope,\u201d says Athena Yvette Portillo, executive producer of Maul: Shadow Lord.<\/p>\n

Portillo is now the vice president of animation production at Lucasfilm, but her first IMDb credit is for the 2012 DVD release Darth Maul Returns, which compiles the Clone Wars episodes that reveal how the character survived his seemingly fatal duel in The Phantom Menace. Filoni, who was the supervising director on that show, is often described as the storytelling apprentice to Lucas. Just a few months ago, he was elevated to the top job at Lucasfilm alongside Lynwen Brennan, who oversees the business side of the company.<\/p>\n

The notion of Maul\u2019s resurrection, however, was one of the times Filoni admits to doubting the master. \u201cMaul was a character that George wanted to bring back in Clone Wars. And I thought that\u2019d be very difficult\u2014since he cut him in half,\u201d Filoni says. \u201cBut he was very confident that I would find a way to make that justifiable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"darthDisney+\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, people like that character,\u201d Filoni says of Maul. \u201cSo they kind of will it back into existence, as long as it comes back in a form that they enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the story that played out in season 4 of the animated show and comic books like writer Henry Gilroy\u2019s The Sith Hunters: Maul summoned the Dark Side of the Force to sustain himself. Sith can do that, you see. Consider that limbless Anakin Skywalker should have burned to death in that lava flow (and maybe he did), but Darth Vader endured. Maul managed the same. Even in a galaxy far, far away, bad grass is hard to kill.<\/p>\n

Through it all, the prevailing motivation for Maul was bitterness. He felt like he had been trashed by Darth Sidious, the Sith alter ego of Palpatine, who used him as one of his pawns while positioning himself as galactic Emperor. It didn\u2019t help that Maul\u2019s wounded body became actual garbage.<\/p>\n

As he clung to life, his broken body was scooped out of that reactor\u2019s ventilation shaft with other detritus and debris, then hauled away to a junkyard world where he nourished himself on vermin and grievance for nearly a decade. He assembled random gears and robot appendages to build a spiderlike thorax, but his mind had been shattered by the trauma of his near-death Dark Side immersion. Maul was more of a rabid animal, overtaken with madness.<\/p>\n

During most of the Clone Wars conflict, he spent years scuttling around those garbage dunes before being discovered by his yellow-hued brother, Savage Opress, who brought the shell-shocked Maul back to their desolate home world of Dathomir in the March 2012 episode titled \u201cRevenge.\u201d Once there, the witchy Mother Talzin harnessed more dark magic to return him to sanity while his lower half was rebuilt to be bipedal again. Now upright, Maul was a man once more.<\/p>\n

\"Maul:Disney+\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

\u201cMaul was a character that George wanted to bring back in Clone Wars. And I thought that\u2019d be very difficult\u2014since he cut him in half,\u201d Filoni tells Esquire.<\/p>\n

Count those as just a few of Maul\u2019s rebirths. As his story continued, he was still yearning to fulfill the promise of his old life. \u201cIn 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,\u201d Filoni says.<\/p>\n

But Palpatine couldn\u2019t care less. Maul is meaningless to him, a born loser, which shatters the broken warrior once again. From then on, he calls himself only Maul\u2014rejecting the Sith title of Darth. He and Palpatine finally came face-to-face again in season 5, after Maul established himself as a reigning warlord among the Mandalorians. His quest for revenge against Palpatine backfires, however, as the Emperor slays his brother and mother, robbing Maul of his family and whatever scraps remained of his dignity.<\/p>\n

That established an enduring trait for Maul: He needs more than one lesson, and he\u2019s going to get more than one lesson. \u201cHe\u2019s this kind of tragic figure who is constantly doomed to repeat his mistakes,\u201d says Matt Michnovetz, the head writer and executive producer of Maul: Shadow Lord. \u201cWe have some empathy for him, but he\u2019s a bad figure. His moral judgment is not the best. He\u2019s determined to achieve his goals through whatever means necessary: manipulation, devious tactics, cruelty in some cases. But he\u2019s a survivor. You got to hand it to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the extermination of the Jedi with Order 66 in Revenge of the Sith, the Emperor seizes control of the galaxy with his new apprentice, Darth Vader, at his side. The seventh season of The Clone Wars, released in 2020, shows Maul using this crisis to escape Republic captivity (with an assist from Ahsoka) and going fully underground, disappearing into the galaxy\u2019s murky world of crime syndicates.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s where Maul: Shadow Lord begins.<\/p>\n

\"Maul:Disney+\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

Maul: Shadow Lord begins after the events of the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series.<\/p>\n

This time, Maul rebuilds himself again. He pulled himself out of the gutter; now he intends to remake himself as someone who seizes respect, if not earns it.<\/p>\n

With a few remaining Mandalorian tribalists still standing with him, mostly for the promise of outlaw cash, Shadow Lord finds Maul setting up his operation on the planet Janix. If the capital world of Coruscant is like a combination of New York and Washington, D.C., and the desert planet of Tatooine is the Wild West, think of Janix as a midpoint metropolis\u2014Chicago or maybe Kansas City, where there\u2019s enough commerce coming and going for criminal operations to take a bite.<\/p>\n

Maul\u2019s first order of business is to kill off the competition by provoking a gang war. He tricks the various hoodlums and crime bosses to take each other out while he personally grows strong enough to finish off a few himself.<\/p>\n

Along the way he will also confront an honest Janix cop, Captain Brander Lawson (voiced by Narcos kingpin actor Wagner Moura, a recent Oscar nominee for The Secret Agent), and meet a young Jedi named Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon), who is also hiding in the underworld from the Empire with her lizard-like master Eeko-Dio Daki (Dennis Haysbert).<\/p>\n

\"darthDisney+\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

Captain Brander Lawson (voiced by Wagner Moura) and a young Jedi named Devon Izara (Gideon Adlon) join the cast.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s reassessing what he needs to do to get back on the map, how to get back onto the galactic stage,\u201d Witwer says. \u201cHe needs to reassert his dominance and his ability to be taken seriously.\u201d Maul has been living outside the law for a while, laying low as a revolutionary and a fugitive. But the other underworld figures he once considered allies have sold him out as the Emperor takes control of the galaxy in the aftermath of Revenge of the Sith, which is when Shadow Lord is set.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll 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,\u201d Witwer says. \u201cSo now he must go around and maybe teach a few people a few lessons, which he feels he has to do if he\u2019s ever going to be taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the kind of premise introduced by some of the granddaddies of all gangster tales. Think 1931\u2019s Little Caesar, with Edward G. Robinson as a crook who rises to the top but ends up dying in the gutter. (\u201cMother of mercy \u2026 is this the end of Rico?\u201d<\/a>) James Cagney had a similar plummet in 1949\u2019s White Heat. (\u201cMade it, Ma! Top o\u2019 the world!\u201d<\/a>) Another comp for the Shadow Lord team was 1989\u2019s Batman, in which Jack Nicholson\u2019s Joker followed a similar arc. (\u201cWinged freak \u2026 Wait till they get a load of me!\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"DarthDisney\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

During his debut appearance in 1999\u2019s The Phantom Menace, Maul (played by Ray Park) was all flash and intimidation.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s part of a tradition established by Lucas himself in Maul\u2019s first movie. He wrote The Phantom Menace while steeped in Flash Gordon serials, World War II bomber movies like 1955\u2019s The Dam Busters, and the swashbuckling Adventures of Robin Hood. \u201cWe created a list of touchstones from old movies, some of the ones you mentioned, all the way up to some of the more modern films and classics,\u201d Michnovetz says. \u201cWe\u2019re big fans of the movie Heat by Michael Mann. Brian De Palma\u2019s The Untouchables was a big part of this. The Godfather.\u201d<\/p>\n

One thing all of those classic gangster movies have in common is a belief by the criminal protagonists that the world is unfairly stacked against them, so violating the rules is the only way to get what they want. They might be right about the first part but not necessarily the second. \u201cThis whole season really plays out like a pulpy noir,\u201d says Shadow Lord supervising director Brad Rau. \u201cIt\u2019s sort of the foundation we\u2019ve been building off of.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wants revenge for everything that\u2019s been taken away from him. And he wants to build his own quote-unquote \u2018family,\u2019 \u201d Portillo adds. \u201cI love that you get into the psyche of Maul, into the mental brainwork of what\u2019s going on with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s just say the man could use some more therapy. \u201cMaul is just a fallen person,\u201d Filoni says. \u201cHe\u2019s put his own needs and greed ahead of everything else, his desire for power and revenge. And that\u2019s what drives him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The destination for that drive, unfortunately, is a dead end.<\/p>\n

\"DarthDisney\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

Ray Park returned to play Darth Maul in Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), with Sam Witwer (The Clone Wars, Rebels) once again providing Maul\u2019s voice.<\/p>\n

We know how Maul\u2019s story wraps up. It\u2019s quiet. Almost mournful. All-around heartbreaking. It happened in season 3 of the animated series Rebels, set shortly before the events of 1977\u2019s original Star Wars: A New Hope, so we know he makes it that far.<\/p>\n

Rebels introduced Maul as a wandering hermit, another of his many reboots. He roams the galaxy still seeking revenge, hunting for Sith artifacts that might empower him. His death comes in the deserts of Tatooine, where Obi-Wan Kenobi\u2014now in his Alec Guinness\u2013looking era, rather than McGregor\u2019s\u2014is living as a hermit too, standing watch over young Luke Skywalker.<\/p>\n

As with their first meeting in The Phantom Menace, the end comes quick for Maul. But this time it\u2019s more tender, maybe even merciful.<\/p>\n

The empty space Shadow Lord fills in Maul\u2019s narrative is what happened between the rise of the Empire and this final moment. How did he go from aspiring hoodlum to lost, solitary wanderer? This show, and parallel projects like the new Benjamin Percy\u2013penned<\/a> comic book prequel, Shadow of Maul, will tell those stories. But we also know the midpoint in his narrative. Someday, in between, Maul will become a mob boss.<\/p>\n

That reveal came in the closing moments of 2018\u2019s Solo, when Maul was revealed as the silent head of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate. This was a shocker to most casual fans, many of whom had no idea that Maul had already been resurrected in comics and animated films.<\/p>\n

Count on Shadow Lord to connect the dots to that moment. \u201cAll of these evil things and all these selfish things scale,\u201d Filoni says. \u201cIt starts out small and it seems petty, but it quickly becomes a fulfillment of desire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"darthDisney+\/Lucasfilm<\/p>\n

“He\u2019s this kind of tragic figure who is constantly doomed to repeat his mistakes,\u201d says Matt Michnovetz, the head writer and executive producer of Maul: Shadow Lord. \u201cWe have some empathy for him … but he\u2019s a survivor. You got to hand it to him.”<\/p>\n

Perhaps the worst thing for Maul is actually achieving his goals. \u201cIf 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\u2019s wrong, what you did,\u201d Filoni adds. \u201cSo 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\u2014and that\u2019s the Dark Side of the Force.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what makes Maul like Sisyphus\u2014forever rolling his boulder uphill and sometimes being crushed by it as it rolls back. The endless possibilities there mean Filoni and company still have many more stories left to tell about him.<\/p>\n

Mother of mercy, this is not the end of Maul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They say you can\u2019t keep a good man down. But in the Star Wars universe, being exceptionally bad…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[379,178351,12497,96,1156,2839,178350,171413,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-509118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-content-type-news","9":"tag-contentid-a55f9177-c1f1-4074-bbc0-7aefdc5567e8","10":"tag-displaytype-long-form-article","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-locale-gb","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-shorttitle-exclusive-why-darth-maul-will-never-die","15":"tag-subsection-tv","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=509118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}