As if the reunion of Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson) and Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) wasn’t enough to get us all up in our feelings about padawans and masters and war and fighting and personal histories… as it turns out, there’s real history fueling the scenes in “Shadow Warrior,” Ahsoka’s fifth episode.
A new featurette offers a too-brief look at the making of the episode, and while it’s lovely to see Christensen look so happy about returning to his role, it’s Dawson who offers up the best tidbit of into: This wasn’t the first time she and Christensen met.
No, that was when they were teenagers.
“I met Hayden when I was sixteen and we were in acting school together over the summer,” Dawson says. That would have been in the mid-’90s, after Dawson made her feature film debut in Kids, which was filmed when she was fifteen. At that point, Christensen, who’s two years younger, had a few roles under his belt.
This video is so short that we don’t get a single detail or even Christensen’s perspective: What does he remember from teen acting class? For Dawson, that decades-ago connection seems to have enriched their scenes together; she says, “And to have that kind of history with him, it really was like seeing my old friend.”
Someone needs to get them both to tell us more about this fateful summer. Were any other Jedi involved?
Ahsoka airs Tuesdays on Disney+.
This post was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
