Moff Gideon will “do his own dirty work” in The Mandalorian season 2

Giancarlo Esposito has had a long, interesting career, but for the last decade or so, he’s become known for playing terrifying, implacable villains. Anyone who’s watched Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul can tell you that there are few onscreen villains more intimidating than meth Gus Fring, who quiet exterior masks a steel trap mind and enormous capacity for violence.

Lately, we’ve seen Esposito flex his villainous muscles on The Mandalorian, where he plays the Imperial remnant Moff Gideon, who wants to get his hands on Baby Yoda at all costs, for reasons still unknown.

Like Fring, Gideon is the boss of his own operation and clearly has a flair for strategy, but he’s also more willing to get his hands dirty. “Moff is very different from Gus Fring,” Esposito told Variety. “He wields his own darksaber. He does his own dirty work and is certainly willing to. He’s much more volatile, he’s much more of the warrior and that could tell us some things about him next season.”

It’s true: Moff Gideon is in possession of the Darksaber, an ancient Mandalorian weapon that’s basically a black-bladed lightsaber. It’s seriously cool, and seriously deadly, and we’ve very concerned about how he got it and what he might do with it.

Those are all things we’ll doubtless learn more about when The Mandalorian season 2 comes out on Disney+ this October (at least if the coronavirus doesn’t result in a delay). The way Esposito talks about how he’s used the Darksaber on set, we can expect at least a few fight scenes. “I’ve gone through two, three?” he said of the Darksaber props. “Three and a half, I think I’ve broken already. But I go at it. Like, I go at it. I’ve broken few of them to the point where the [prop] guys, they love me ‘Just so you know,’ they whisper to me, ‘we only have one more.’”

Might he even get into a duel with our beloved Mandalorian? The prospect already has me nervous; few things can defend against a lightsaber, dark or otherwise.

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