With Tales of the Empire now out in the world and available to watch in its entirety on Disney Plus, StarWars.com took the chance to catch up with series stars Meredith Salenger and Diana Lee Inosanto, who was thrilled to delve further into her Nightsister character and her history before we first met her in The Mandalorian.
But the first time Dave Filoni suggested that Elsbeth might live on in animation, Inosanto thought it was a joke. They were in production for the Ahsoka series at the time, set after fans first met the Magistrate of Calodan in The Mandalorian. “He said something about being able to go to work in sweatpants. And then when I got the call it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really happening.’ He wasn’t kidding, you know?”
Meredith Salenger has long played Barriss and has her own thoughts on the moral centre of a character who has made some dark decisions.
Salenger hopes fans will be as overjoyed as she has been to discover Barriss’ next chapter. “She has been through so much,” she says.
But through it all, Barriss’ moral center has held true. “I just love her strength of conviction. I love that she has an intense feeling about what she thinks is right, even though she did what she did. She’s been under the tutelage of two very different kinds of people — the Grand Inquisitor and of course, her Jedi Master Luminara Unduli, — but the most important thing about Barriss is that she answers to her own moral compass.”
Stay tuned for our Tales of the Empire review coming to the site very soon, and listen below to the Tales of the Empire Fan Roundtable, of which Fantha Tracks was a very grateful part.
