Star Wars: The Mandalorian’s Christopher Lloyd Celebrates Joining Franchise

Last week’s episode of Star Wars: The Mandalorian did something few other chapters in the Disney+ series have managed, multiple surprising celebrity cameos. Not only did Lizzo and Jack Black appear as a royal power couple, but character actor and 1980s icon Christopher Lloyd also made his Star Wars debut, and clearly had a blast doing. “Great Scott! Traveling through space and time has led me to a galaxy far, far away!” Lloyd tweeted. “Thank you to the incredible @themandalorian community for the warm embrace. It was an honor to join this iconic franchise and be a part of the force.”

Lloyd’s casting in The Mandalorian was revealed a year ago thanks to a report, but Star Wars fans definitely forgot about the news as his addition to the series clearly caught many by surprise. The Back to the Future star’s role in the series is one that definitely had die-hards interested. Playing the part of Commissioner Helgait, Lloyd took on a role that had deep ties to the Star Wars prequels, as he used his position to make the planet’s droids (including Separatist Battle Droids) into malfunctioning. His character even revealed himself to have been allied with Count Dooku in the pre-Empire era. 

What’s next for Star Wars?

Over the weekend at Star Wars Celebration came the first confirmation about what feature films in the franchise are in the works. One of the three movies will be directed by none other than Dave Filoni. The longtime Star Wars creative previously made his mark on the franchise with its animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and its feature film. In recent years Filoni has transitioned into working with Favreau on The Mandalorian and its various other live-action spinoffs. The feature film he’s directing will be a culminating event for all of the TV shows on Disney+ set in the same era as The Mandalorian.

“Jon [Favreau] and I have our own little theater that we’ve been playing in, but Star Wars is a big galaxy. I think there’s a lot of possibilities, but we do things our own way,” Filoni revealed to ComicBook.com in an exclusive interview.  “I think of, you know, A New Hope is an important moment in the timeline. The Death Star blows up. That changes everything … A cinematic moment for this time period has to be a moment that’s changing things and we understand it as the audience and then it can ripple down if we have other shows going on underneath that. So if there was a show taking place in the New Hope time period that you were watching as a kid, you would understand that things have changed in the show because the Death Star blew up. But they didn’t necessarily need to be there. So there’s a ton of possibilities for how to tell these stories in a unique way for Star Wars as well.”