The Mandalorian star Pedro Pascal talks Baby Yoda, season 2 and more

The Mandalorian on Disney+ is arguably the best live-action Star Wars product the House of Mouse has produced since it acquired Lucasfilm in 2012. Part of the reason for the show’s success is undoubtedly the massive popularity of the Child, or as the internet knows it, Baby Yoda. This adorable, frighteningly powerful bundle of joy spent the first season getting to know the Mandalorian (Game of Thrones veteran Pedro Pascal), who narrowly kept him out of the hands of Rebel remnants who wanted to use his power for their own plans.

For his part, Pascal wasn’t at all surprised that the wee green tyke was such a hit. “I can’t bring myself to lie and be like ‘we had no idea of the sensation that he would be’,” he told Yahoo Movies UK. “We never talked about it being a sure thing, but I unconsciously kept to myself that the very first time I saw the image in the illustration during that first meeting, I was like ‘oh my God, people are going to lose their mind over that’.”

Part of what sold Pascal on the Baby Yoda was how much care the Star Wars team took with the lifelike doll. “There’s all the history they bring to it from the other films and from their experiences on other films,” he said. “You’re among the best and so you just really have to make yourself a passenger to that. To see them care for the doll and also find different ways for it to express itself and become an incredible scene partner is incredibly fascinating. It’s a pretty adorable thing.”

Another cast member who got to work a lot with Baby Yoda was Werner Herzog, who played the sinister Client:

This is still my favorite performance on the show.

And it sounds like Herzog, a famous filmmaker who didn’t know a thing about Star Wars before taking this role was just as entertaining when the cameras stopped rolling, particularly when he was sticking up for his little green costar. “It was a mechanical device of incredible intensity and calibre,” he told Total Film Magazine, speaking about the Baby Yoda puppet. “Heartbreaking to just look at it. And then they contemplated… for security, they thought, ‘We should do it green screen and as a digital effect.’ And I said, ‘No, you shouldn’t do it! You are the trailblazers. You are showing us a new technology. Show it to the world that you are confident. Don’t be cowards!’ And they dropped it.”

Can’t you just see Herzog saying that stuff? I can, and it’s my happy place. “You could see that the little creature had heartbreaking expressions – you could see it. Trust what you see with your naked eye; trust what the camera saw because you can see it on the screen, see it on the monitor – trust in what you see.”

I know the Client basically can’t come back for The Mandalorian season 2, but man do I wish it were otherwise.

CANNES, FRANCE – MAY 19: Werner Herzog attends the screening of “A Hidden Life (Une Vie Cachée)” during the 72nd annual Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2019 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images)

Anyway, back to Pascal, landing the lead role on the show was a long, secret process, but things moved quickly for Pascal after he met the showrunners. “At the start of this thing, the most secret part of it was the first phone call. They said that [creator] Jon Favreau and [executive producer] Dave Filoni wanted to meet me to talk about ‘something Star Wars.’ Those were the words.”

"So when I went to go and meet Jon, they brought me into a room where the walls were covered, corner to corner, with story illustrations of the whole first season. It was obviously this incredible Star Wars story with a Boba Fett-looking character at the centre of most of it and then, obviously, this adorable, small Baby Yoda.All on the same day, they took me to the set where they were doing camera tests. They introduced me to [Lucasfilm President] Kathleen Kennedy, they put the helmet on my head and then Jon sent me off with six scripts to look at and to get an idea. I might be getting him in trouble. The studio may not know this."

Imagine landing a lead role in something knowing the audience was barely ever going to see your face. Ah, if it’s this show, it’s worth it.

Chapter 3. The Child and the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) in THE MANDALORIAN, exclusively on Disney+

By now, Pascal is used to the lead character’s iconic suit and armor, but it took a minute to get over the weirdness of it all. “It was a very surreal experience,” he said. “I was born in 1975, so the first movie came out when I was a child. It’s weird to have that movie be some of the earliest memories you can carve out from the recesses of your mind — that incredible desert landscape, the floating vehicle, the hologram of Princess Leia, a terrifying trash compactor. I had that stuff getting into my childhood imagination so young and marking it.”

"Stepping on to the set — and in a costume that is so directly related to your childhood memories — was something I had never imagined could happen. It’s hard to describe. It’s a real tingle, a very magical feeling and a bizarre one. You are this middle-aged man looking at yourself. It’s like in childhood and the first time you discovered what Halloween was — people would give you free candy for dressing up in something cool. It’s kind of magic."

But yes, if you’re wondering, it is kind of hard to move in, as cool as it looks. “For me, it’s not so much breaking a prop but accidentally walking into walls and falling into holes because I had no peripheral vision,” he told Digital Spy. “And the width, with all the added armour, is… you know, it takes up more room than I’m used to. It can be a funny sight.” But apparently it fits “perfectly.” This armor is full of contradictions. “It tells as much of a story as, I suppose, the actor in it. You know what I mean? You stand still, and, without much effort, you look cooler than in anything you’ve ever seen before [laughs].”

One advantage of the armor: it means another actor can step into the role for a bit without anyone really noticing, which happened on one episode in season 1. For those instances, Pascal thought it was “important to establish a kind of physical posture, or a language of stillness” so there would be continuity no matter who was in the suit.

“There were dramatic kind of scenes that it was sort of important to me that one gesture or one head movement would be as important to me as the text, or as important as any kind of dialogue,” Pascal said. “So I was a bit of a stickler about those kinds of things. And then, of course, you know, there’s things that this old body could not handle [laughs] that others did. So it was really a kind of invented collaboration that we’re still sort of, I guess, fine-tuning.”

Pascal is also very complimentary of Favreau and Filoni, which is great, because if the people at the top don’t believe in the show, no one will. “I felt confident because I could see two men who, above anything else, had a real love for what the fans love. So much so that they weren’t going to preoccupy themselves with servicing the fans, but just really dedicating themselves to telling Star Wars stories and using all of the elements they love the most in really creative ways to surprise fans and bring in new fans.”

"It’s kind of a beautiful thing because obviously there’s so much merchandise that comes with the Star Wars world and it’s such a business. So it was really beautiful to see two guys putting so much love into it. That more than anything is what it’s exciting people and drawing them in, whether they’re conscious of it or not."

He’s not kidding about the merchandise — Star Wars is famous for milking every drop  although it did take a while for Baby Yoda figurines to come on the market, since the show wanted to keep his existence a secret. I guess we can call that integrity?

So what can fans of The Mandalorian expect for season 2? Come on, Pedro Pascal, reveal your secrets! “They can expect me to not talk about it at all,” he said. “Only so they can experience the second season in the same way they experienced the first — that sort of awe and surprise. It’s pretty wonderful.”

So he’s not saying much, although he did revealed that the second season has been in the works for a while; they were working on it before season 1 even premiered, in fact. They were confident with this one, as well they might be.

The Mandalorian season 2 is set to make its debut in October. Hopefully that holds.

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h/t GamesRadar