When it was announced that the highly acclaimed, award-winning actor Jeremy Allen White would be making his debut in a galaxy far, far away in this month’s upcoming The Mandalorian and Grogu film, there was a great deal of excitement around such a move. However, few if any could have predicted precisely the role that the charismatic and pathos-driven performer would be taking on: that of Rotta the Hutt.
Rotta the Hutt is not only the son of the infamous Jabba the Hutt, but he has also been an established character within the larger Star Wars franchise for decades already, having initially made his debut in Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars animated movie.
Who is Rotta the Hutt?
Firstly, its crucial to understand what The Clone Wars movie actually was, in relation to The Mandalorian and Grogu.
Whereas The Mandalorian and Grogu was a studio-mandated movie made off the back of the success of the Disney+ streaming series, The Mandalorian, 2008’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a studio-mandated movie made in an effort to launch a successful TV series. While Lucasfilm Animation’s projects may seem fairly commonplace today, The Clone Wars marked their first real foray into such extensive efforts.
As such, it was decided that the first several episodes of the initial season would instead be packaged into a feature-length theatrical release, in the hopes of catching audiences’ attention. The commercial and artistic merits of that decision are still up for debate, but those initial episodes that became the movie featured a storyline that saw Anakin Skywalker and the young Ahoska Tano being tasked with rescuing Rotta the Hutt from a kidnapping plot.
At this point in the timeline, Rotta was just a Huttlet, a little baby, and was referred to consistently throughout the film as “Stinky” by Ahsoka, because he was, you guessed it, stinky. That film ended with the heroes successfully getting Rotta back to his family and thwarting the machinations of the Confederacy, much to Jabba’s pleasure and Count Dooku’s dismay.
Rotta would go on to get a slight return in a later episode of The Clone Wars series, when Jabba would make an appearance with his son by his side. But other than that, Rotta has been conspicuously absent from Star Wars media in the years since then.
In a franchise where it can sometimes seem like every character who has ever even appeared in a single frame of footage has gotten an extensive backstory via comics and tie-in novels, Rotta has remained largely unexplored, which makes his return in The Mandalorian and Grogu all the more significant.
The marketing has made a point of showcasing that Jeremy Allen White’s version of the character is a buff, gladiatorial character who has grown into his own entity within the Hutt syndicate. Furthermore, given the timeline of these events, the film is taking place roughly five years after Jabba the Hutt was killed by Leia Organa in Return of the Jedi, which opens up a whole host of new angles to be explored via this character.
For as unusual a decision as it may have initially seemed, having Jeremy Allen White come aboard this new Star Wars project to play Rotta the Hutt does seem to indicate that Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are taking the character and the story potential he now has quite seriously.
Though Rotta may have begun as little more than the butt of a joke back in 2008, he has now evolved into a fully formed character played by an incredibly popular performer nearly two decades later in The Mandalorian and Grogu. And if that isn’t a trademark Star Wars move, I’m not sure what is.
The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters on May 22.
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