If you have a Darksaber, don’t let Giancarlo Esposito borrow it. The actor who plays Moff Gideon on The Mandalorian apparently went through six of them when he fought Din Djarin in season two of the Star Wars show.
In an interview on The Kelly Clarkson show (via SYFY WIRE), Esposito shared that in his character’s big battle with Mando, he decided that he needed to take over fighting duties because his stunt double looked nothing like him.
“He was 25 years younger, he was standing like this, and his shoulders were kind of small. Very nice boy, but I went, ‘How is that going to work? We never see his face and my body is very different,'” Giancarlo recounted to Clarkson. “So [Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau] went, ‘Hmmm, you’ve got a point there.’ Before he could finish his sentence, I said, ‘I’m doing the fight.’ I went off in the corner with [stunt double for Pedro Pascal] Lateef Crowder—a great, great stuntman. I wanted to do it so badly.”
One person who wasn’t excited by the news was the show’s prop master, who kept telling Giancarlo to cool it, as he only had a certain number of dark sabers in stock. “He comes over to me and says, [panting] ‘I just want you to know, I just have one more. You’ve got to be careful,’” Giancarlo recalled. “Because you want to pull your shots, you want to be really careful. But you [also] have to make it look good. We made it through. I got a great, great scene and I learned a lot.”
That season two battle didn’t go so well for Giancarlo’s Moff Gideon. Season three, however, has seen things looking better for the Moff. How he’ll fare during the season finale remains to be seen, though we’ll find out soon enough when the final episode of season three drops on Disney+ tomorrow.
