The star behind The Mandalorian, Pedro Pascal, accidentally revealed his character’s name during an interview last month where he discussed the new Star Wars series for Disney+.
The Mandalorian is set after the events of Return of the Jedi, but before The Force Awakens and follows the adventures of a bounty hunter as he embarks on a secret mission at the service of a mysterious man with connections to the fallen Empire.
It was originally rumoured that Disney would create a standalone movie about Boba Fett, but they instead moved forward with a story about a different bounty hunter who wears Fett’s classic Mandalorian armour.
Throughout the series, The Mandalorian’s real name has never been revealed, but Pascal casually let slip the character’s name during an interview with Screen Slam.
The actor said, “The Mandalorian, whose real name is Dyn Jarren, is your iconically cool, flawed, mysterious, loner gunslinger that harkens to the best of the samurai movies and the Westerns and in talking to Jon [Favreau] I asked him what should I be looking at. I know he loves movies. I love movies. What should I be watching? And he immediately brought up Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa, Yojimbo, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. So, he’s very samurai, Clint and me.”
Dyn Jarren is the phonetic spelling, as no one really knows how it’s actually spelled.
It seems as though the name isn’t a huge spoiler if Pascal was willing to just drop it in the interview, but it’s still interesting to hear.
Pascal explained a little more about why it’s so interesting to play the character, “I love the opportunity to make him as human and as accessible as possible. Which is strange to say because it’s impossible to get to him because he’s covered in armour from head to toe. And yet, the idea is that he’s relatable – we’re all kind of covered in our own armour and terrified of taking that armour off. And that’s the thing that crosses him over into a character that we’re all going to really want to follow.”
Favreau previously spoke to Entertainment Weekly about those same influences, “What happens after a revolution? After the celebrations are over, when there’s no structure? Typically, in human history, unless you’re very lucky, those are times of tremendous chaos.
“Like after the Roman Empire falls, or when you don’t have a centralized Shogun in Japan, and, of course the Old West, when there wasn’t any government [on the frontier] — all the types of movies that inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars.”
We can’t talk about The Mandalorian and not mention Baby Yoda, who has become an Internet sensation since the first episode of the show was released.
In episode four, Baby Yoda and Mando are in the cockpit of the spaceship and Baby Yoda gets the overwhelming urge to press a glowing green button. It’s not been made into a meme about the fight for the radio power switch with Mando turning the music off every time Baby Yoda turns it back on.
Pascal responded to one tweet in particular that had been edited to include Toto’s ‘Africa’ in the scene, saying, “Except I would never switch off that song.”
The Mandalorian really is the gift that keeps on giving.