Bryce Dallas Howard Details The Mandalorian’s Epic Apollo 13 Easter Egg

Earlier this season in Disney+‘s The Mandalorian, actress turned director Bryce Dallas Howard returned to the series to helm an episode of the live-action Star Wars series. Fans were quick to notice that Howard’s episode featured a huge Easter egg, as she paid homage to her father Ron Howard’s movie Apollo 13 with a sequence where Mando takes his ship The Razor Crest for a rough landing. Speaking in a new interview, Howard opened up about what made her land on this specific homage to her dad’s work which was don’t not just because she could make a reference to her father Star Wars canon.

“Apollo 13 was definitely something that I referenced, more than anything because I so vividly remember my experience, because I was there the whole time,” Howard told Digital Spy. ” One of my jobs (on the set of Apollo 13) was to get everyone’s orders for lunch together, because, during lunch, we would watch dailies. I would gather the lunches, and then I would watch the dailies during lunch, and then it was rinse and repeat for dinnertime. And so I was there every single day, and saw how they do every single thing. And because we were shooting stuff in space, I was like, “OK, OK, there’s a few shots that I just really, really want to make sure we get.”

She continued, “Also, because my grandfather was an aerospace engineer. My mum’s dad worked at NASA. So there are certain things that I just wanted to incorporate so that, if you were watching, you would know how terrible a landing it was [laughs]. We needed it for folks who don’t fly – it needed to look like the worst landing that Mando had ever experienced [laughs].”

Star Wars: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+. The season two finale premieres on Friday, December 18.

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