Solo: A Star Wars Story depicted the early days of Han Solo and his journey to where we first saw him in Star Wars: A New Hope. An interesting piece of the puzzle came in the film’s final scenes, depicting his cohort Qi’ra as secretly being an underling of Maul, who movie audiences last saw in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Keeping in tradition with how the character came to life for movies, one actor gave the physical performance while another actor provided the voice. While Peter Serafinowicz provided Maul’s voice in 1999, the actor revealed that, despite recording lines for Solo, he found out after the film’s premiere that his performance was replaced.
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“I was like, ‘Wow, okay, cool. How cool to bring this character back.’ And Ray Park was doing it and it was all secret. I went in and did it,” Serafinowicz shared with Collider when asked about being offered a chance to reprise the role. “I recorded this scene and I went to whatever studio, Pinewood Studios, and I was on the set and I spoke to [director] Ron Howard for about half an hour about the character, and like, what he’d become, which was like 29 minutes more than I spoke to George Lucas about the character 20 years ago.”
He continued, “So I did it and then it was all super secret. Ray Park was coming in the day after to film the actual physical thing and they had to bring him in a blacked out limousine. It was like an area of the set that was off limits to everybody and it’s all secret, secret, secret. And then I was excited that this film was gonna come out because I was gonna take my kids and a friend and be like, ‘I got a secret.’ I mean, I told my kid, but it’ll be a cool thing. We’ll just go with your friends to see the new Star Wars film and then your dad’s in it.”
Despite his involvement in the film, the actor didn’t discover he was replaced by the actor who voiced Maul in Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels until after the film’s premiere.
“I saw it on Twitter that there were people at the premiere and I thought, ‘Huh, I was not invited.’ And then I got this email saying, ‘We’re sorry, but we actually changed the voice actor to [Sam Witwer],’ which is, kind of, fair enough,” the actor admitted. “They said it was better for the continuity of the thing, which is a bit disappointing.”
The open-ended nature of Solo‘s conclusion could allow Maul to appear in another film, though, based on Lucasfilm’s decision about the voice, we likely won’t hear Serafinowicz reprise the role anytime soon.
Do you wish the actor’s voice had been used in the film? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!
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