Created by Lucasfilm president and chief creative officer Dave Filoni and Matt Michnovetz, and arriving on Disney Plus on 6th April, Maul: Shadow Lord is a 10-part series that will shine a light on Maul’s incursion into the galactic underrworld, featuring Sam Witwer as Maul, Gideon Adlon as Twi’lek Jedi Devon Izara, Wagner Moura as Janix police detective Brander Lawson and Richard Ayoade as Lawson’s droid partner Two-Boots. Speaking to Animation Magazine, Supervising director Brad Rau discussed the opportunity the show presented to fill in even more of Maul’s past, following on from his appearances in The Clone Wars, Rebels and Solo.
“The thing that Dave put to us is, how do we tell this portion of this guy’s story? What is he doing when the Empire rises? What is he doing, trying to get revenge? He only has, like, two lines in Phantom Menace, so he’s just always been this mysterious, interesting character that we felt like the time was right to tell his story. We keep a measure of mystery around him. It’s an interesting narrative balance. How do we focus on facets of this character without ruining him by telling you too much?”
Cinematography and effects lead Joel Aron also described Filoni’s intention to make sure that Maul: Shadow Lord always remained an animated show.
“At no point do I ever want the show to look like we’re crossing the line into live action,. That’s something that Dave has always made sure that we don’t do, and so I think because of that, we have a very, very tight relationship with the artists that are producing the show.”
Animation supervisor Keith Kellogg also described the improved rigs used to bring even more depth and detail to the characters faces.
“We really tried to push our rigs at the start of the show so that our character rigs could both deliver a little more subtle facial performances, and then for the action scenes and things, we really wanted to try and concentrate on silhouettes of the character. So we enabled the rig … to really shape that silhouette a bit more, so that we could really get a very artistic, slightly anime kind of style.”
The cast is rounded out by Dennis Haysbert, Chris Diamantopoulos, Charlie Bushnell, Vanessa Marshall, David W. Collins, A.J. LoCascio and Steve Blum, and Fantha Tracks shall be reviewing each epsiode here on the site as well as on episodes of Making Tracks: Reaction Chat on Fantha Tracks Radio with Mark Newbold and Mark Mulcaster and on Sunday nights on Good Morning Tatooine with Brian Cameron and Paul Naylor.
