We know who Forest Whitaker is in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and it’s awesome!

 

Well, we knew the reveal was coming and now it has…

Forest Whitaker’s character in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is a Clone Wars character called Saw Gerrera. And he’s quite the character.

The character was from Season 5 of Clone Wars where he and his sister, Steela, was unleashing war on the droid army invading his home planet of Onderon. He was a friend of Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan and Ashoka Tano in the episode dubbed A War on Two Fronts as the three Jedi trained the brother and sister to be freedom fighters.

“In the show, Saw was voiced by Andrew Kishino, and Whitaker’s appearance has some subtle homages to The Clone Wars character. The eyes are different — the animated show featured vivid aquamarine eyes, while Whitaker’s are brown — but they maintained the scar that slices up over his left eye. (In the cartoon, it bisects the eyebrow, but in the live-action film, the cut arches just above it.) In this new image of Whitaker, he also looks fairly different than what we first saw in the trailer. Here, he has a full head of hair, while in the previous footage he was shaved.”

Since Rogue One takes place some twenty years after the Clone Wars, Saw is a more battle-hardened figure and has changed considerably while, as stated above, maintaining some Clone Wars familiarities.

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said: “Consider him kind of a battered veteran who leads a band of Rebel extremists. He’s on the fringe of the Rebel Alliance. Even [they] are a little concerned about him.”

This seems to be where the new Star Wars continuity really starts to kick into gear because, while he’s a friend to Rogue One squadron in the movie, Kennedy says “He’s off on his own.”

Also, in Claudia Gray’s Star Wars: Bloodline novel, taking place between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, Leia Organa is confronted by a rival who challenges her on the “terrorist tactics of the Rebel Alliance [and specifically] the campaigns of Saw Gerrera’s Partisans.”

Rogue One takes place when a new threat is going to either destroy the universe or pull it together and that’s where Saw comes in in this story: “The Death Star is the event that sort of pulls everybody into a place of unity, and prior to that it’s a little bit more divided. Who are at the different ends of that spectrum?” says Kiri Hart, Lucasfilm’s head of story development.

We can’t wait to see the continuation of Saw’s story all these years after the Clone Wars… this is another exciting step in the overall Star Wars story.

What do you think?

Source: EW