The first season of the American television series The Mandalorian is part of the Star Wars franchise, set after the events of the film Return of the Jedi (1983). It follows a lone bounty hunter who goes on the run to protect "The Child". The season was produced by Lucasfilm, Fairview Entertainment, and Golem Creations, with Jon Favreau serving as showrunner.
Pedro Pascal stars as the title character. Work on a new live-action Star Wars television series was announced in November 2017. Favreau signed on in March 2018, with Pascal cast a month after filming began in October 2018 at Manhattan Beach Studios in California. Visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic developed the StageCraft technology for the series, using virtual sets and a 360-degree video wall to create the series' environments. In addition to this new technology, practical effects were emphasized for the series.
The eight-episode season premiered on the streaming service Disney+ on November 12, 2019, and ran until December 27. It was met with positive reviews, with praise for the visual effects, action sequences, characters, performances (particularly Pascal's), the chemistry between the title character and the Child, cinematography, and Ludwig Göransson's musical score. It was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series at the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, and won seven Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. A second season was confirmed in July 2019.
Episodes
Cast and characters
Starring Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin / The Mandalorian "The Child"
Recurring co-stars
Carl Weathers as Greef Karga Werner Herzog as "The Client" Omid Abtahi as Dr. Pershing Nick Nolte as the voice of Kuiil Taika Waititi as the voice of IG-11 Gina Carano as Cara Dune Giancarlo Esposito as Moff Gideon Emily Swallow as "The Armorer"
Other co-stars
Amy Sedaris as Peli Motto Jake Cannavale as Toro Calican Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand
Mark Boone Junior as Ran Malk Bill Burr as Migs Mayfeld Natalia Tena as Xi'an Clancy Brown as Burg Richard Ayoade as the voice of Q9-0 Ismael Cruz Córdova as Qin
Production
Development In November 2017, Disney CEO Bob Iger announced that Disney and Lucasfilm were developing a live-action Star Wars television series for the new streaming service Disney+. Jon Favreau pitched an idea for the series to Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who suggested he discuss the idea with Dave Filoni, executive producer on the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. In March 2018, Lucasfilm announced that Favreau would write and executive produce the series, with Filoni, Kennedy, and Colin Wilson also executive producing. In May, Favreau said he had written four of the series' eight episodes before being officially hired for the project.
Favreau announced that the series was titled The Mandalorian on October 3, and revealed the premise of the show. Directors for the season were revealed the next day, including Filoni, Taika Waititi, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rick Famuyiwa, and Deborah Chow. Favreau was unable to direct any of the first season due to his commitments to The Lion King (2019), and wanted the series' directors to be a diverse group of filmmakers who could bring different perspectives to the series. The only prerequisite he had for the directors was that they love Star Wars. According to Famuyiwa, Favreau described the group as a "Dirty Dozen, Magnificent Seven type of crew". The season had a budget of $100 million.
Casting After being rumored to be cast in the title role, Pedro Pascal was confirmed to be portraying the Mandalorian in November 2018. Pascal initially thought he was being cast as the Star Wars character Boba Fett due to the visual similarities between that character and the Mandalorian, but the latter is actually a separate character named Din Djarin. Gina Carano and Nick Nolte joined the series' cast later in November. Lucasfilm announced the next month that Pascal would star alongside Carano, Nolte, Giancarlo Esposito, Emily Swallow, Carl Weathers, Omid Abtahi, and Werner Herzog. Favreau revealed in March 2019 that Taika Waititi would provide the voice for a bounty hunter droid in the series, believed to be the character IG-88. This was revealed a month later to be a new character, IG-11, when character details for other cast members were announced. Weathers' character, Greef Karga, was originally an alien that was killed off in the third episode; the prosthetic make-up was removed and the role extended during production.
The footage shown at Star Wars Celebration in April 2019 revealed that Bill Burr and Mark Boone Junior had been cast in the season, with Burr portraying an outlaw. At the D23 Expo in August, it was revealed Ming-Na Wen would appear, and the next month, Julia Jones's casting was announced.
Filming and effects New technology
Visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic, a subsidiary of Lucasfilm, partnered with video game developer Epic Games to create a new system for the series named StageCraft, based on Epic's game engine Unreal Engine. StageCraft consists of large LED video screens on which digital environments can be rendered in real time for actors to perform in front of. During pre-production on the series, virtual photography was used to plan the series' filming and determine what environments would be needed on set. The digital environments were then created by ILM and added to StageCraft ready for live action photography with the actors. Some of these environments were based on location photography in countries such as Iceland and Chile. During filming, the digital environments were rendered on a video wall in real time, allowing the filmmakers and actors to see the environments. The images rendered on the video wall were often of a high enough quality to be used as final effects.
Principal photography Filming began during the first week of October 2018, with Filoni directing the first episode. The season was filmed at Manhattan Beach Studios in California under the working title Project Huckleberry, with limited location filming in the Los Angeles area. This first and third episodes were filmed together as one block, with Filoni and Chow working on their episodes at the same time. George Lucas visited the series' set as a birthday surprise for Favreau on October 19. Several items described as "nothing of substance" were stolen from the series' set on October 25.
Filoni made his live-action directorial debut with the series. He saw The Mandalorian as a chance to apply lessons he had learned from Lucas about live-action filmmaking during the making of the Star Wars animated series, and also described Favreau as a mentor who was furthering Filoni's education and could help him overcome challenges specific to live-action. Filoni also served as a second unit director for the other filmmakers, filming quick pick-up shots for them as needed while they were busy on other scenes. Favreau noted that the fourth episode of the series, "Sanctuary", was the most difficult to make due to its forest setting and action requirements, and joked that this was the reason that Howard, the most inexperienced of the first season's directors, was given that episode to direct. Howard felt protected by the experience of Favreau and Filoni, feeling comfortable to go to them with any questions about filmmaking and Star Wars, respectively. Howard also felt she had creative freedom when directing the episode, something that surprised her father Ron Howard who directed the film Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).
Pascal's commitments to filming Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) and performing in a Broadway production of King Lear resulted in stunt doubles Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder portraying the Mandalorian on set in Pascal's absence, with Pascal later dubbing the lines. Pascal said he felt uneasy about this when there were "more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene [and not] being able to totally author" the performance. But he said it was "so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to" Wayne and Crowder. Wayne worked with Pascal to develop the movements of the character. Filming for the first season wrapped on February 27, 2019.
Practical effects Favreau and the series' directors put emphasis on using practical effects where possible, with Famuyiwa explaining that it was the combination of groundbreaking effects and a grounded world and characters that first drew him to Star Wars as a child. Favreau noted that the StageCraft technology used during filming allowed the filmmakers to use more traditional production techniques since they were working within an environment that they could see on set. Legacy Effects created practical armor for the series, as well as the animatronics for the alien creatures. Visual effects were used to remove puppeteers and control rods from scenes that used puppets. One of the modelmakers creating models and puppets for the series was Tony McVey, who worked on the original Star Wars films. In order to recreate techniques used on the original Star Wars films, The Mandalorians prop master, Josh Roth, designed new weapons for the series based on real guns, as the original props had been modified versions of World War II gun props.
"The Child" was created primarily with an animatronic puppet, which was augmented with visual effects. The production had originally expected to mostly use CGI for the character. Different puppeteers controlled its body and head movements, its eyes, and its ears. Other puppeteers moved it for walking scenes. During filming on the third episode, Chow and the visual effects team removed the puppet so they could film a version of a scene without it. This was in case they decided that the puppet was not convincing enough and would need to be replaced with CGI. Herzog called them cowards for not trusting the puppet, and encouraged them not to avoid visual effects. He proved to be right, as the production discovered that the puppet worked better than expected and began retooling scenes to work around its limitations rather than resort to CGI.
Favreau wanted the series to feature "D-list" characters from the Star Wars films, which led to him creating the Ugnaught character Kuill. The species was first introduced in the background of The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Legacy's effects supervisor John Rosengrant explained that a performer could not emote through the heavy prosthetics required to portray an Ugnaught, so animatronics were added to the prosthetic head. Actress Misty Rosas wore the head and costume for the character while one puppeteer controlled the mouth movements and another controlled the eyebrows. The character's lines were recorded ahead of filming, with actor Nick Nolte providing two or three different readings for each line that could be played for the other actors. While performing, Rosas had to use physical signals to indicate to the puppeteers when she wanted the character speak.