Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Series Teased!
EW reports.
Jude Law and Chris Ford drop Star Wars: Skeleton Crew teases
Law also credits Star Wars for turning him into an actor.
There are a slew of new Star Wars series on tap for Disney+. But while Ahsoka promises to pick up where Star Wars Rebels left off, and The Acolyte will take audiences on a martial-arts-infused trip back to the waning days of the High Republic, many fans aren’t quite sure what to expect from a third upcoming series, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.
The entry from Jon Watts and Chris Ford has been billed by Watts as “a story about a group of kids, about 10 years old, from a tiny little planet who accidentally get lost in the Star Wars galaxy. And it’s the story of their journey trying to find their way home.”
Many references to Amblin and kid-centric movies of the 1980s like E.T. and The Goonies have been made, with executive producer Jon Favreau telling EW that “With [Amblin co-founder] Kathy Kennedy running Lucasfilm, when John Watts and Chris Ford come in and talked about wanting to do something that feels like an Amblin movie and has that tone, it’s like you’re speaking right to the person who was there and knows the 11 herbs and spices that go into it.”
So who exactly is Skeleton Crew for? Kids? Adults? Both? We got some guidance when star Jude Law and co-creator Ford stopped by EW’s Dagobah Dispatch podcast to chat about the new show — and what kind of tone we should expect.
“Skeleton Crew’s tone is an adventure,” Ford says. “We wanted it to be a lot of fun. But of course, along with adventure comes the downside of it, which is danger. And when the kids are in danger, it’s extra fraught. So we played with that, but overall we wanted it to be just a fun adventure.”
As for whether the show is specifically targeting younger audiences with its pint-size cast, Ford notes, “Hopefully it can be for all ages. When we told Kathy Kennedy about that we wanted to go for that Amblin tone, which she perfected over the years, what she would say is that they never thought of those as movies for kids. They just happen to be about kids, a story of a kid going on an adventure. So it could be for anyone.”
As for the adult in the room — or on the screen, as it were — Law will neither confirm nor deny that he’s playing a Jedi… though his character does levitate an object in the trailer shown at Star Wars Celebration in April. “I can’t tell you very much about my character,” the actor says. “He is someone the children meet on their attempt to get home. He is like a lot of the world that they experience: contradictory, and at times a place of nurture and other times a place of threat.”
It’s that balance between light and dark — much like the Force itself — that Law believes will propel the show forward. “Because it’s through their eyes,” he says of the younger characters (played by Ravi Cabot-Conyers, Kyriana Kratter, Robert Timothy Smith, and Ryan Kiera Armstrong), “at times there’s a sort of goofy nature and a goofy relationship between the kids and the adults. And then other times it’s really quite dark and quite scary, which I guess is what the world probably looks like to an awful lot of 11-year-olds.”
While Law has also done time in some other big franchises — namely Marvel and Harry Potter — for him, Star Wars is much more personal. “Star Wars, for me, held a very particular place because it was as much a part of my childhood as going to school,” he says. “Literally as far back as I remember, I remember having Star Wars in my life. It was the toys I played with, it was the toys I envied my friends had. I remember one of them having an AT-AT walker and I was never going to get given an AT-AT, so I’d go over and play at his house so I could use the AT-AT walker.”
In fact, Law credits getting into his current profession due to his love of playing out scenes from Star Wars movies: “Probably the reason I started acting was running around a playground pretending to be Luke or Han or Chewbacca or Vader — that literally was what I was playing and acting as a child. And so being in it is both kind of surreal and seems very second-nature in some ways. And then also slightly out of body.”
To hear our entire conversation with Law and Ford — in addition to an interview with the director and cast of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, as well as an exclusive Star Wars audio excerpt — check out the latest episode of Dagobah Dispatch.
This looks interesting.
