Mary Elizabeth Winstead Joins The Cast Of ‘Ahsoka’
Momentum is building for the Ahsoka series coming soon to Disney+. Every few weeks, it seems there is a new member added to the cast. Rosario Dawson will reprise her role as Ahsoka, which she took on for the second season of The Mandalorian. Last summer, it was announced Hayden Christiansen would reprise his role of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader. Last fall, we learned about Australian actress Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Ukrainian actress Ivanna Sakhno. And now there is one more.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead has joined the burgeoning cast of Ahsoka, which begins production this month in Los Angeles. Details on what her role is are still unknown at this time. However, the majority of Winstead’s roles of late have been action-based. In 2021, Winstead starred in the Netflix thriller Kate. Prior to that, Winstead played The Huntress in Birds of Prey (2019), and she co-starred with Will Smith in Gemini Man (2019), directed by Ang Lee.
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Winstead is pretty seasoned when it comes to a variety of movie genres. Since 2007, she has appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, Live Free or Die Hard, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, where she won a Saturn Award for Leading Actress. Winstead also played a prominent role in the television series Fargo (2017).
As a child, Winstead hoped to pursue a career as a ballerina, appearing in local ballet productions. However, as a teen, Winstead was forced to quit due to her height. This was when she decided to become an actor. For the rest of her high school years, Winstead was homeschooled. Winstead also contemplated a career as a singer but ultimately did not follow through. Although, it has come in handy on set.
According to the plot summary for Ahsoka, Ahsoka is a Togruta female who was the Padawan learner to Anakin Skywalker and a hero of the Clone Wars. However, as her story unfolded, her destiny lay along a different path from the Jedi. When last seen in The Mandalorian, Ahsoka is on the hunt for the evil Grand Admiral Thrawn in the hope of locating the missing Ezra Bridger, the young Jedi that disappeared with Thrawn many years ago.
Star Wars Rebels concluded with Thrawn and Ezra Bridger bound together via the purrgils and shooting off into hyperspace. The coda, narrated by Sabine Wren, summarized her plans to locate Ezra with help from Ahsoka. Since the Rebels series finale in 2018, finding Ezra has been one of the most anticipated events in Star Wars. Ezra was one of the main characters in Rebels and literally “bridged” the gap between the prequels and the original trilogy. Unfortunately, he is the only one, along with Thrawn, that did not receive closure at the end of the series.
Even before the casting news, Winstead already had a connection to Star Wars. In 2017, Winstead began dating Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi), and their son was born in June 2021. With all of the secrecy surrounding each Star Wars project, one must wonder if they share stories about working on Star Wars.
As it stands now, the cast consists of Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka), Hayden Christiansen (Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker), and recent reports stated Natasha Liu Bordizzo will play Sabine Wren. Ivanna Sakhno will play a “formidable mercenary” named Astrid. There have also been rumors that Barriss Offee might appear in the series. Offee was Ahsoka’s friend during their Padawan days in the Jedi Order. Eventually, Offee grew resentful of the Jedi and framed Ahsoka for murder in season 5 of The Clone Wars. Little by little, the cast of Ahsoka grows more and more impressive with old talent and new faces.
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Written By Eric Onkenhout
Source(s): The Hollywood Reporter, CBR [1] [2], Wikipedia
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