Posted in: Disney+, Star Wars, streaming, TV | Tagged: Ahsoka, ahsoka tano, dave filoni, disney, rosario dawson, star wars, star wars: the clone wars

Ahsoka Star Rosario Dawson: From "Hyped Fangirl" to Star Wars Lead

Ahsoka star Rosario Dawson and creator Dave Filoni discuss both the character's journey as well as Dawson's personal journey to the role.

Since Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm in 2012, they're making a lot of Star Wars fans' dreams come true, most famously in Ming-Na Wen, who plays bounty hunter Fennec Shand, and Rosario Dawson, who plays Ahsoka Tano, in the upcoming Disney+ series of the same name. While Fennec is an original character, Ahsoka's history goes back to Dave Filoni's first Star Wars animated creation in the series The Clone Wars. Voiced by Ashley Eckstein, the character was able to gain a life of her own, carrying momentum into other animated projects, including an older incarnation in Rebels and additional exposition in the recent Tales of the Jedi. On the live-action front, Dawson made her franchise debut in The Mandalorian and the spinoff The Book of Boba Fett before fronting her series.

"I was literally doing jumping jacks," Dawson told Entertainment Weekly in June before the SAG-AFTRA strike. "I remember seeing Jon and Dave's faces, like, 'Ooh, did we make the right decision? She's a little bit… hyped fangirl.'" "I was very fortunate," Ahsoka creator Filoni said at Star Wars Celebration in London. "The whole thing kind of came together for me with Rosario when we talked with her and when she put on the costume and became Ahsoka. I was like, 'You know, this is going to work.' It really was as simple as that."

Ahsoka trained under Anakin Skywalker as a Padawan during TCW despite her mentor not being a Master by the Jedi Council. The two went through various adventures along with Anakin's master Obi-Wan Kenobi. Fate would have it that Dawson already followed the original series when fanart from BossLogic first imagined the actress in that role, which coincidentally caught the eye of Filoni. "It goes back to a quote that [Lucasfilm president] Kathleen Kennedy gave me when I was really going over the casting of 'Ahsoka,'" he recalled. "I said, 'How do you know when it's the right person?' And she just looked at me and said, 'Dave, you just know.' And she was right. I just knew when it was Rosario, and that kind of brought Ahsoka together for me, and off we ran."

For more, including how Dawson compared Ahsoka's journey in Rebels to Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, comments from the remaining cast Natasha Liu Bordizzo, (Sabine Wren) Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Hera Syndulla), Lars Mikkelsen (Thrawn), Daina Lee Inosanto (Morgan Elsbeth), Ivanna Sakhno (Shin Hati), and the late Ray Stevenson (Baylan Skoll), you can check out the piece here. Ahsoka premieres on August 23rd on Disney+.

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