Bill Burr returns for The Mandalorian season 2, Terminator star Michael Biehn comes aboard

The world of movies and television might have ground to a halt in recent weeks due to the world’s ongoing coronavirus crisis, but we’re still getting plenty of casting news and rumors about Disney’s The Mandalorian. Word is that Rosario Dawson will play a live-action version of Ahsoka Tano, a Jedi outcast and key character from the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. And now, MakingStarWars reports that Terminator and Aliens star Michael Biehn will play a bounty hunter in the show’s second season.

This news was soon confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter. The rumor is that he’s playing a bounty hunter from Mando’s past, but is he friend or enemy? Is he a character drawn from somewhere in the already-establish Star Wars canon — we’ve heard Disney wants to bring in some legacy character — or someone new?

In any case, filming forThe Mandalorian season 2 wrapped up earlier this month, meaning that Biehn will have already completed his scenes. This could be the biggest project Biehn has worked on since the 80s, when he played Kyle Reese in The Terminator (1984) and Corporal Dwayne Hicks in Aliens, both major roles in influential James Cameron movies. You might also recognize him from The Abyss, The Rock, Grindhouse and Tombstone.

Biehn will join other season regulars Pedro Pascal, Carl Weathers, Gina Carano and Giancarlo Esposito. Deadline also just reported that Bill Burr will return for season 2 as the mercenary Mayfield, one of a band of Mando’s past associates he abandoned in a cell after they double-crossed him on a job. Maybe they team up with Biehn’s character to get revenge? I know we said we don’t know if Biehn’s bounty hunter character is a friend or an enemy, but just how many friends does Mando have in his past, really?

BURBANK, CA – SEPTEMBER 10: Actor Michael Biehn attends the Burbank International Film Festival’s Presentation 30th Anniversary Screening Of “Aliens” held at AMC 16 on September 10, 2016 in Burbank, California. (Photo by Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images)

Speaking of casting for Star Wars spinoff shows, VFX supervisor Neal Scanlan told MovieWeb that Disney may be looking to include characters cut from the films in the upcoming series about Cassian Andor, Diego Luna’s character from Rogue One. “We also have this backlog of characters,” Scanlan said. “A lot of the characters that we built for all of the films either didn’t make it to the final cut, because that’s just the way that the film process happens, or that they are seen so momentarily that there is this wonderful second opportunity to bring back some of the characters that we’ve made and bring them to this new storyline in a more, shall we say, integrated way.”

"I think it’s going to be tremendous. I find that it’s a second opportunity for everything that we’ve made, plus the opportunity of moving TV along, in a sense, at what will not at all be diminished as far as the level of quality, the level of things that we are going to try and achieve."

I, for one, am going to be on the lookout for some strange creatures when this series drops!

The Mandalorian season 2 is set to premiere on Disney+ in October. But given the current situation of movies and TV shows being delayed at every turn, that may change. Hopefully not too much!

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