Mandalorian season 2 reportedly casts Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano

After one hell of a premiere season cliffhanger ending, fans are eagerly awaiting the second season of The Mandalorian. Luckily, since the sophomore run of the Star Wars live-action show had been in production since before the first season had even finished airing on Disney+, it hasn’t really been affected by all of the Covid-19 production delays. That being said though, we’ve heard almost nothing about it. This weekend past though, some MASSIVE news broke.

According to a report from Slashfilm, the upcoming season of The Mandalorian will see the live-action debut of fan-favourite character Ahsoka Tano. Yes, the beloved Jedi is making the jump from the world of animation in Star Wars: Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels to live-action. What’s more though, according to the report, Ahsoka will be played by none other than Rosario Dawson. This is a bit of a fan-casting dream come true as early as 2017, fans had been calling for the actress to take up the role. And Dawson herself was game for it as you can see in the clip below. And now, she’s got the gig. That is if Slashfilm’s sources are on the money, which they usually are.

Hmmm… @starwars for @rosariodawson? YES! She talks about wanting to be in a future film.

Cc: @dave_filoni @pablohidalgo #AhsokaLives pic.twitter.com/TI0tjVtXPE

— Good Morning America (@GMA) April 21, 2017

As for Ahsoka, she was originally created by Dave Filoni as the co-star of the Clone Wars animated movie and TV series, where she was introduced as the hot-headed young padawan of Anakin Skywalker. While “Snips”, as Anakin playfully called her, was originally rather on the annoying side, Filoni would give her an incredible character arc, turning her into one of the most beloved and complex characters in the entire franchise.

Last we had seen of Ahsoka was in the closing moments of the series finale of Star Wars Rebels after she had cheated death thanks to the time-travelling intervention of Ezra Bridger. The series epilogue is set an indeterminate time after Ezra is lost in the farthest reaches of space while battling Grand Admiral Thrawn (a battle involving space whales, seriously), and we see an older Ahsoka and colourful Mandalorian warrior Sabine Wren set out on a quest to find him. At the time, it was widely presumed that this was the setup for whatever Star Wars show Filoni did next. Of course, Filoni’s next animated Star Wars offering was Star Wars Resistance, which had nothing to do with Ahsoka and Sabine. But maybe that’s because that story was going to get told in live-action form in another series?

After all, former Disney CEO Bob Iger had said quite recently that following the massive success of the first season of The Mandalorian (on which Filoni is a co-creator, writer and director) that the future of Star Wars was on TV. More specifically, for the second season of the hit show, they were looking at “infusing it with more characters and the possibility of taking those characters in their own direction in terms of series,” i.e. get a spinoff. Then there’s the matter of the Darksaber, the iconic black-bladed lightsaber seen being wielded by Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon in the first season finale. Before that surprising appearance, the Darksaber was last featured most prominently in Star Wars Rebels in the possession of none other than Sabine who is… well… a Mandalorian.

Could that Rebels epilogue maybe take place in the same time period as The Mandalorian? Could this be some way for Filoni to tie up lingering threads? Does this mean we could eventually get a live-action version of Ezra and – most importantly – Thrawn? With how secretive Disney is about Star Wars, these are all questions that are probably going to drive us fans nuts over the next few months until season two of The Mandalorian debuts in October.

Last Updated: March 23, 2020