Tiya Sircar Knew Sabine’s Star Wars Rebels Backstory From the Very Beginning

Star Wars Rebels fans got a special treat when the last episode ‘Trials of the Darksaber’ aired. […]

September 5, 2017, 8:45pm

Star Wars Rebels fans got a special treat when the last episode “Trials of the Darksaber” aired. Not only did they get Mandalorian mythology and history, intense action, and a lot of emotion, they also finally learned the real backstory of Sabine, the Mandalorian member of the team. She didn’t abandon her family – she was abandoned. She also revealed, during an emotional fight with Kanan, that her family abandoned her after she refused to continue developing weapons for the Empire – weapons they used against other Mandalorians.

NEXT: Star Wars Rebels is Best With Its Heart on Its Sleeve and Mind in Lore

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It’s a heavy bit of information, and her guilt and anger over it colors everything we’ve seen with regards to the character up until now – two and a half seasons of Sabine now have a different slant. As it turns out, actress Tiya Sircar, who voices the character, had a rare gift in serialized storytelling – she knew all along.

“At the very beginning, when, I think, Vanessa [Marshall, voice of Hera], Freddie [Prinze, Jr. voice of Kanan], and I had our very first meeting with Dave and had our first recording session, we sat down and basically had a chat about our characters and a little background about each of them and the dynamic between the characters, and I think it was then, which was years ago at this point, he told me some of her … he told me a version of her backstory,” Sircar told ComicBook.com in an interview. “I was so intrigued and he said, ‘We’re going to get to it, but not just yet. That’s going to be over several seasons, hopefully, we’ll flesh this out but this is basically what happened to you and why you’re here.’”

Of course, the actress did not know it would be two and a half seasons before she got to reveal what she knew. She started asking him questions right away and he said she’d have to wait a couple of seasons. She did say the story evolved, though the basics stayed the same.

“It was this huge, huge secret that I didn’t even know if the Ghost crew knew. Only half of that [what she was originally told] is now what was revealed, because it was a different scenario with my family members, or which family members and what happened,” Sircar explained, “but the basic storyline about the weapon and who the Empire was going to use the weapon against and that being why I left, and carrying this tremendous guilt; all of that was given to me from the very, very beginning.”

That’s breaking showrunner Dave Filoni’s notorious rule of not giving his actors too much of the story in advance, only providing them with “exactly what we need,” she achknowledged. “He’s so deliberate and he knows exactly what’s what, so if he feels like I need to know something, I feel confident that that’s what I need to know and nothing more.”

In this case, she said the fan in her was thinking, “I want to know what happened!” but she had the right amount of information for her performance.

It brings more weight to Sabine’s line when she gets her jetpack, and her backstory starts to come out, “Finally,” that’s for sure.

Star Wars Rebels returns with “Legacy of Mandalore” on February 18, 2017. Enjoying the show? Click in the box below to rate it in our database!