Not much is known about The Mandalorian, the live-action Star Wars TV show coming to Disney+ later this year, but we do know a basic premise and the phenomenal list of directors.
One such director is Taika Waititi, who is perhaps best-known for directing Thor: Ragnarok. He’ll be directing an episode of The Mandalorian, and he’s reportedly actually directing the finale. But he also has a role in the show portraying a character, and he has teased that the character has some sort of connection to Boba Fett.
Then last week, The Mandalorian showrunner Jon Favreau posted a photo on Instagram of Waititi recording voice lines for a character shown on screen. That character looks pretty familiar.
This isn’t the first time that Favreau has shared an image of this character; he previously shared an image of the droid with the caption “Merry Christmas!” That led many people to presume that this character is actually IG-88, the bounty hunter first seen in The Empire Strikes Back. More recently he has appeared in the animated Forces of Destiny series and in the Star Wars Adventures comic series, in which he is revealed to still be alive during the events of the sequel trilogy. So it would absolutely work for this droid to actually be IG-88, and that’d be a very cool thing for Star Wars fans. Additionally, that would absolutely fit Waititi’s tease of this character having some connection with Boba Fett, since IG-88 obviously had run-ins with Fett in the past.
Of course, there’s nothing here that explicitly confirms that this IG unit is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s possible it could be another droid altogether. But Favreau teasing this character, the look of the droid, and making sense of the little we do know makes it very plausible that this is IG-88. And if so, that’s a very cool role for Waititi to be providing the voice for.
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