The main Star Wars: Rebels panel at New York Comic Con on Thursday was certainly filled with several exciting and surprising bits of info. But after that, stars Sarah Michelle Gellar, Taylor Gray and Ashley Eckstein and executive producer Dave Filoni met with members of the press for a highly informative conference.
Gellar had to leave early due to another commitment, so she only had 10 minutes to speak. When asked about the experience of voice acting, she called being in a booth “the greatest thing ever,” since it requires no makeup. Seriously though, she called being voice recording “extremely creative” and said she does “wield an imaginary lightsaber” when recording.
Later, Eckstein did note that Filoni likes to have the actors record their lines together. However, there was one person they couldn’t record with: James Earl Jones. Filoni managed to get Jones to record lines for Darth Vader, who made an appearance in the Rebels season one finale and will be seen in season two.
As I noted in the report about the panel, Gellar finally joined the Star Wars family when she was cast to voice the evil Seventh Sister. The character will have to face Kanan, the Jedi voiced by Gellar’s husband, Freddie Prinze Jr.
Since Filoni knows a thing or two about how to talk about a show without giving any plot details, he was very engaging about the process of making the show and how they decide which familiar characters appear in Rebels.
“Everything affects each other as far as their time period is concerned and as far as you think it would echo out,” Filoni said about the Star Wars expanded universe and how films, television shows and books are linked. “Someone down the line is creating a story in whatever medium and you say, ‘This is a Rebellion story and they have a secret agent for the Rebels, stealing information.’ The story group’s going to say, ‘Well, we have that and we called it Fulcrum here.’ Now, does it make sense to be called Fulcrum there?
“What’s great is we have a group of people that are now fully aware of all the continuities that can reach out to the different creatives and keep it all in line,” Filoni continued. “So, if there was a movie that was very close in time to the time period that I was doing, we would be in constant contact.”
Filoni noted that he has met with all the directors assigned to the different Star Wars movies in production and they all want to make sure they get it right because they are all Star Wars fans.
It was also interesting to learn that the Grand Inquisitor, who was killed at the end of season one, will still have an impact on season two. That’s because one of the subplots will center on the struggle for power among the Inquisitors, who are sent out by Vader to help hunt down Jedi and Rebels.
Filoni said that he also tells the actors all about the backgrounds of their characters, that way they can factor it into their performances.
Rebels returns on Disney XD on Oct. 14. Here’s the trailer screened at the convention: