This year we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Return of the Jedi, and one of the actors who played a key role in that film returned to reprise the role in a new project.
Denis Lawson, who played Wedge Antilles in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi before returning for a cameo appearance in The Rise of Skywalker, voiced the role in Visions Volume 2! He was part of the short from Aardman titled “I Am Your Mother” – which, yes, is a twist on that iconic Star Wars line. The short stars a young Twi’lek named Anni who longs to be a pilot, and she gets involved in a starship race that’s overseen by Wedge.
“We were looking for some kind of idol that Anni would be looking up to,” the short’s director, Magdalena Osinska, told Empire. “We settled on Wedge Antilles, because he fitted in terms of the Star Wars era. Also, he’s done pretty amazing things in Star Wars, but he wasn’t maybe as recognised [for it].”
Visions Volume 2 arrived on Disney+ on May 4 in celebration of Star Wars Day, and though it’s not considered to be canon, each of the shorts are fun, creative, and visually stunning expressions of different themes of the franchise with new twists. And it’s especially cool that Wedge is back, and that Denis Lawson voiced him. Wedge is a great character and the more pilot stuff we get the better, and it’s always great to see some of these legacy actors returning to the role. Wedge has the rare distinction of being the pilot that actually survived both Death Star assaults and appeared in all three films of the original trilogy, and though we haven’t heard much about his character after the Civil War came to an end, there’s plenty of potential for it.
Wedge even made an appearance in The Rise of Skywalker at the Battle of Exegol, and Lawson said elsewhere at Celebration that he got a message directly from director J.J. Abrams wanting to make it work. They managed to find one day where the schedules worked, which is why the role wasn’t any bigger in the film, but Wedge still appeared, as part of the galactic fleet recruited by Lando and Chewie, to aid the Resistance in their final defeat of the Final Order.
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