Two years ago, Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo announced Star Wars: Rebels at New York Comic Con and was only able to show a few pieces of concept art as a tease. Now, the show is about to start its second season on Disney XD and will be a full year with 22 episodes. Executive producer Dave Filoni and actors Sarah Michelle Gellar, Taylor Gray and Ashley Eckstein were at the energetic panel on Thursday.
For those not aware, Rebels is a fun show set five years before A New Hope. It is practically an extension of Filoni’s Clone Wars series, but is much lighter in tone at the start. The show focuses on Ezra (Gray), a young boy who joins up with the Ghost crew to help out the fledgling Rebels, who have yet to become the Rebel Alliance we saw in the Original Trilogy. The show is both for kids – as it is told mostly through Ezra’s perspective – but also for adults, since it doesn’t shy away from the dangers of their fight against the evil Empire.
The biggest addition to the Rebels family is Gellar, who plays the Seventh Sister, the evil new Inquisitor in season two. Coincidentally, Gellar’s husband, Freddie Prinze Jr., is also a member of the Rebels crew as the Jedi Kanan.
Gellar described the Seventh Sister as a “thinking man’s villain,” since she likes to toy with her eventual victims. It was also a nice change of pace for her. She goes from playing strong female heroes like Buffy The Vampire Slayer to playing a strong female villain. During an after-panel press conference, she joked that she took the role to finally have some street cred with her daughter’s friends. After all, Prinze voices a Jedi!
The panel also touched on the return of Ahsoka Tano (Eckstein), Anakin Skywalker’s padawan during the Clone Wars. Eckstein did apologize to fans for spoiling Ahsoka’s surprise return during the season one finale. But don’t expect to see Ahsoka more often in season two.
“Ashoka shows up when necessary. She deals with the bigger, darker problems,” Filoni said. He also explained how the character has to act much differently than her younger version from Clone Wars since she is no longer a Jedi.
Gray and Gellar are both new members of the Star Wars family. Gray sounded overwhelmed by the huge fanbase and noted that as his character is learning about the universe, so is he. Gellar was incredibly excited to finally be a part of the Star Wars family, which already has some “incredible role models” for female fans. She suggested that the series does get an unfair “bad rap” because there are some wonderful female characters in the series.
Filoni also showed off a few exciting new clips from season two of Rebels, which is definitely going to feature some familiar faces form Clone Wars.
More was revealed later at a press conference for Rebels, with Filoni going into much deeper detail on the direction of the series. Check back here for further coverage on that. In the meantime, Rebels resumes on Disney XD on Oct. 14.