Star Wars: The Mandalorian Director Reveals What Makes the Main Character Different From Boba Fett

Ever since his live-action debut in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Boba Fett has become a recognizable character in the world of science fiction, but Star Wars: The Mandalorian director Dave Filoni points out in the above behind-the-scenes featurette that the series’ main character has some major differences from Fett. Fans of Filoni’s will remember that the characters and culture played a major part of his Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels animated series, but viewers who aren’t familiar with those series will likely immediately assume the intimidating character is the bounty hunter we saw in the original trilogy.

“Our character’s much more bulked up than Boba ever was,” Filoni pointed out. “His armor’s actually quite different, if you look at it. His helmet’s quite different, little traits to it. The colors of it, you know, all these things point out all these differences. There are similarities which are almost unavoidable, but we wanted to tell a story with somebody where we kinda had more of a blank page to write it.”

Fans first met Boba Fett in an animated sequence in The Star Wars Holiday Special, but with that special having only been broadcast once, audiences are much more familiar with Fett due to his capture of Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back and subsequent appearance in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Despite his apparent death in that film, Fett went on to appear in a number of other novels and comic books, all of which were erased from canon when Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012.

While The Mandalorian might not focus on Fett, there are key components of the Mandalorian culture that will be explored, which will surely feel reminiscent of what fans know about that bounty hunter.

“It’s interesting to me, we all know the helmet. The helmet is Boba Fett,” Filoni admitted. “And that was a big challenge in the beginning of this, and [producer] Jon [Favreau] and I went round and round, ‘Well, how do we tell this story? It’s not Boba Fett, or is it Boba Fett,’ you know? We would talk about that. But a helmet at the end of the day is a helmet, and I’ve shown that helmet quite a bit on Rebels and Clone Wars, and so there are fans that get the language of it. It’s a tool, it’s a piece of equipment. But to the average person, if you show them that helmet, if they say anything, they’ll say it’s Boba Fett.”

Star Wars: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can do that here.

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