This party’s not over. In May, it will have been 20 years since Mace Windu’s defenestration in 2005’s Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, which saw the purple lightsaber-wielding Jedi Master (Samuel L. Jackson) disarmed by fellow Jedi Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) before being killed by Chancellor Palpatine’s (Ian McDiarmid) Sith lightning. Or was he? For nearly a decade, Jackson has insisted that Mace Windu is alive — his supposed death did occur off-screen, after all — and it’s a point that Bryce Dallas Howard has raised with Lucasfilm executive vice president and chief creative officer Dave Filoni.
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“Sam Jackson has been incredibly supportive of me and has told me many times that he would act in something I directed, which is like, ‘I’m not worthy,’ basically,” Howard said of her Argylle co-star on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
Howard, who has directed episodes of the live-action Star Wars series The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Skeleton Crew, then “went straight to Dave Filoni and I was like, ‘So, let’s just talk about Mace Windu and where he is. Can we just talk about this?’”
“Because is he dead?” she added. “Is he?”
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Jackson’s co-stars from the Star Wars prequel trilogy have since returned to the galaxy far, far away: McDiarmid reprised his role as the Emperor in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Ewan McGregor returned as Obi-Wan in 2022’s Obi-Wan Kenobi on Disney+, and Christensen appeared as both Anakin and Darth Vader in Obi-Wan and Ahsoka (and will next return in Ahsoka season 2).
“Of course he is [alive]! Jedi can fall from amazing distances,” Jackson told Entertainment Weekly back in 2016. “And there’s a long history of one-handed Jedi. So why not?” The actor also revealed that series creator George Lucas, who sold Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012, gave Jackson his blessing to retcon Windu’s death in Revenge of the Sith.
“George doesn’t have anything to do with [Star Wars] anymore,” Jackson said at the time. “George is like, ‘I’m okay with that. You can be alive.’”
Meanwhile, Disney has continued to tell Mace Windu stories set before his apparent death in Sith. A five-issue Marvel comic, 2017’s Star Wars: Mace Windu, took place between the events of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, and a 2024 second volume — a prequel to the prequels — was set just before the rise of the Separatists and the beginning of the Clone Wars.
Mace Windu also features in Marvel’s just launched Star Wars: Jedi Knights comic series written by Marc Guggenheim (Star Wars: Yoda) with art by Madibek Musabekov (Marvel’s Star Wars).
