The Mandalorian and Grogu reassembles the ragtag team of Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his always hungry Force-wielding green pal Grogu. Yet they aren’t alone in this space adventure, as they encounter Rotta the Hutt (voiced by The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White), the son of the infamous Jabba.
Fortress of Solitude spoke to The Mandalorian and Grogu director and co-writer Jon Favreau about Rotta and how his path differs from other Hutts, especially his father. “I think what Star Wars is able to capture is that in the lives of the characters, they’re influenced by the choices that they make along the way, and nobody’s fate is decided for them,” Favreau said. “That decisions are made both good or bad. You see characters that have tragic declines, others that have redemptions, and some of them go through all of those sequences. I think what’s enduring about Star Wars and why it’s lasted 50 years isn’t just the lightsabers and the visual effects, it’s also the mythic stories at the core that George Lucas imbued his stories with.”
For Favreau and Dave Filoni, this has been a common theme in this new phase of Star Wars, as they have both mentioned wanting to honor the legacy of Lucas, even in characters like Rotta. “We try to aspire to that too, which means that you have to have fully fleshed-out real characters in the backdrop of this very larger-than-life fantasy world that he created,” Favreau added. “[In terms of] the idea of Rotta the Hutt, technology allowed us to have an animated version of a Hutt that was not limited by what the five-person puppet was from the original trilogy. So that created an opportunity, but I think as a fan it was an exciting prospect to have an athletic Hutt.”
Now, the internet has obviously had its fun in pointing out how jacked Rotta is, but as Favreau revealed, there is a precedent for that in Star Wars lore. “There was a tradition of that from the graphic novels,” Favreau stressed. “There was a character named Grakkus who I always thought was a cool rendering of a very strong, powerful Hutt.”
Favreau also revealed that he spoke to another famous filmmaker who had been working in the Star Wars Universe but departed before his vision was realized. “I’m friends with Guillermo del Toro,” Favreau said. “He had been exploring similar themes when he was considering collaborating with Lucasfilm on something around Jabba in a different time period. But having those discussions and getting advice from my peers definitely informed this as well. I won’t say more about it, because maybe someday he’ll collaborate on that. I think he’s got some great stories in mind and set pieces.”
In terms of Rotta’s characterization, Favreau dived into a popular theme within Star Wars: the relationship between father and son. “There are so many father-son stories in Star Wars,” Favreau said. “I thought here we have one at our center with the Mandalorian, who’s turning out to be a pretty good dad in the world of Star Wars, but what would it be like to grow up in the shadow of Jabba?”
Favreau added how when Baby Yoda was revealed to the public, social media users started to share their favorite Star Wars babies, including one who was known as Stinky in The Clone Wars. This was a baby Rotta, and the character stuck with Favreau and Filoni.
“So, with Dave Filoni, this was his first project for the big screen,” Favreau said. “And we joked back and forth about that character, and I guess he was in the back of my mind as I was writing. What’s an unlikely outcome for this guy? And then how do you make it real? How do you really explore what that really must be like?
“Because that’s the trick with Star Wars. You got to take something that’s fantastical, weird, and surreal, but play it to the hilt of reality which is what the performances of Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill were. They weren’t winking through the movies. Carrie Fisher took things very seriously, and as a young viewer, I appreciated it, because I saw it as a sincere piece of storytelling. Of course my dad and our parents’ generation saw it as a fun fairy tale. But to us, it was everything. So we try to be earnest in our storytelling.”
The Mandalorian and Grogu zips into theaters on May 22.
