The latest episode of The Mandalorian Season 2 featured a big surprise for longtime Star Wars fans in Episode 6, "The Tragedy": Boba Fett was back. Not only was Boba Fett back, but so was Temuera Morrison, who originally played Boba's dad, Jango Fett, in the prequel trilogy. As Morrison readily admitted in a recent interview, Boba's return to Star Wars is a big surprise considering the character was gobbled up by the Sarlacc pit in 1983's Return of the Jedi. Figuring out how to work in the now-aging bounty hunter into The Mandalorian was a big task — one that "The Tragedy" director Robert Rodriguez was happy to explain to Collider.
Collider's own Steve Weintraub had the chance to discuss Rodriguez's experience directing "The Tragedy" during their conversation for the director's upcoming Netflix movie, We Can Be Heroes. At one point in the conversation, we asked Rodriguez what it felt like to be in charge of basically reviving Boba Fett (even though his return was technically teased in the Season 2 premiere).
"It was my 12-year-old dream," Rodriguez told us. "When I was 12 was when Empire Strikes Back came out and I was a huge Boba Fett fan. You know, they would tease him out before the movie came out. You already knew he was going to be a character to watch. The marketing was really great, like, 'This character Boba Fett,' and so when you saw the movie, you couldn't wait to see him. He captured your imagination before the movie even came out; it's all we were talking about at school. I still remember that, how mysterious that character was. You got a little taste of him but you were waiting to see more."
He went on to explain, "When I saw the script (on sent me the script) and it said 'Boba Fett' and 'Darksaber' and 'Mando' and 'Fennec,' I was just like, 'This doesn't even feel like a real script. It feels like a fan wrote this in a fever dream hoping that this would be an episode.' And yes, this was the script. It had all the good stuff in it. It was like a 'Greatest Hits' of all the good stuff; I couldn't believe it. To go play in Star Wars with all the toys and to get to play with Boba Fett as one of your main [characters] — I just thought, 'I gotta go in there and just have him be... I don't know if he's going to show up in any more episodes or what, so I just gotta make him super badass in this moment [and] be that character that I imagined him being when I heard about him when I was 12. That was my mission, just to go satisfy that 12-year-old fascination with the character."
We also made sure to ask if there were any scenes that didn't make it into Rodriguez's episode. "The Tragedy" was packed with action as well as a touching story revolving around Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and Baby Yoda. Did Rodriguez have to leave anything on the cutting room floor.
To our surprise, Rodriguez revealed that "the script was really short," and went on to say, "The script was much shorter than the episode. The script was, like, 19 pages so that suggests 19 minutes. I added a lot of action to this [episode]. I even asked Jon [favreau], I said, 'Is it okay that my script is only 19 pages? Because I cut really fast and it's probably going to end up being 16 minutes. Do we need to add more pages?' and he goes, 'No, that's what you're here for! You need to fill that out.' I said, 'Oh, okay, I'll try and make that battle longer.' So that's where that extra battle came from."
Rodriguez continued, "I know my tendency is to cut things pretty tight. If I have a 100-page script, it's a 90-minute movie. So I had a 19-page script [and] I thought, 'Whoa! I'm gonna run out of things to do, so I added a lot of action."
The Mandalorian Seasons 1 and 2 are now available to stream on Disney+. New episodes of Season 2 air every Friday through December 18. Get even more Star Wars updates here.