Star Wars: Ahsoka: everything you need to know about The Mandalorian spin-off

Ahsoka Tano has never appeared in a live-action Star Wars movie but that doesn’t mean she’s a secondary character in that galaxy far, far away. In fact, you could argue that the new Ahsoka TV show on Disney Plus is long overdue. 

As Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice throughout that famous interstellar skirmish known as the Clone Wars, Ahsoka had a front row seat for many of the most pivotal events in Star Wars canon. And even after the Jedi were hunted to near-extinction by the Emperor’s forces, she became pivotal in the formation of the Rebel Alliance.

Having first appeared in animated shows The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels (where she was voiced by Ashley Eckstein), Ahsoka made her live-action debut in The Mandalorian season 2 episode ‘The Jedi’. Here she was played by Rosario Dawson, who subsequently reprised the role in The Book of Boba Fett, and has returned to headline the hotly anticipated Ahsoka TV show when it lands on Disney Plus in 2023. 

This Mandalorian spin-off couldn’t be in better hands, with Dave Filoni – the man who oversaw both The Clone Wars and Rebels, and co-created the eponymous lead character – calling the shots as showrunner. 

Of course, if you’re yet to watch the animated Star Wars TV shows, you may be asking why Anakin’s former apprentices warrants her own series. Everyone else, however, will simply be wondering why an Ahsoka TV show has taken so long to make it to the screen…

Release date: Disney Plus is yet to confirm a specific Ahsoka release date but we were told to expect a 2023 debut at Star Wars Celebration back in May.

Cast: Rosario Dawson reprises her Mandalorian role as Ahsoka Tano, alongside Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Star Wars Rebels’ resident Mando Sabine Wren, and Eman Esfandi as wannabe Jedi Ezra Bridger. Hayden Christensen is also reportedly set to return as Anakin Skywalker.

Story: Plot specifics are, as is standard, hidden behind Lucasfilm’s impregnable defense field. It seems likely, however, that the story will send Ahsoka and Sabine on a quest to track down trainee Jedi Ezra Bridger and his Imperial nemesis, Grand Admiral Thrawn.

SPOILER ALERT! Proceed with caution if you’re yet to watch The Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels, The Mandalorian or The Book of Boba Fett.

Ahsoka on Disney Plus release date

Ahsoka release date: some time in 2023 

Ahsoka was one of many new Star Wars and Marvel TV shows announced at the Disney Investor Day in December 2020, but Disney are making us wait to see it on our TV screens.

Luckily, we shouldn’t have to hold on too much longer as it was confirmed at Star Wars Celebration in May that the Ahsoka release date will be some time in 2023. Seeing as The Mandalorian season 3 has already wrapped production and is due to debut on March 1, 2023, we suspect Ahsoka will land  on Disney Plus some time after Mando and Baby Yoda have continued their adventures.

A tweet from the official Star Wars account confirmed that production began on Star Wars: Ahsoka on May 9, 2022.

In early September 2022, Rosario Dawson told ScreenRant that production had “a couple months left”, suggesting the shoot wrapped in November. 

Who is Ahsoka Tano?

“When gone am I, the last of a Jedi will you be,” a dying Yoda told Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. 

But the wise old Jedi Master was only correct from a certain point of view. Because although Ahsoka Tano isn’t technically a Jedi – she left the Order before passing the relevant trials – in all other regards, she has all the necessary qualifications.

Ahsoka made her first appearance in 2008, in the animated Clone Wars movie that set up the long-running TV show. The Togruta teen was subsequently Anakin Skywalker’s Padawan apprentice throughout the eponymous conflict. 

A highly respected commander in the Republic forces, Ahsoka fought with a distinctive two-lightsaber style, and was nicknamed “Snips” by her master, owing to her supposedly snippy attitude. She referred to Anakin as “Sky Guy”.

Ahsoka went on to play a key role in Star Wars Rebels, set during the run-up to A New Hope, and she’s since returned in The Mandalorian season 2 episode ‘The Jedi’ and The Book of Boba Fett episode ‘From the Desert Comes a Stranger’.  Her voice can also be heard among the choir of Jedi giving Rey a pep talk in The Rise of Skywalker.

Ahsoka on Disney Plus: trailer

There’s been no Ahsoka trailer released as yet, but  the lucky people who attended Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim in May 2022 did get to see some very brief footage from this exciting addition to Lucasfilm’s ever-expanding line-up of Star Wars TV shows on Disney Plus.

According to Collider, the teaser featured shots of Ahsoka (from behind) in a Jedi Temple, and on board the Ghost, the heroes’ ship in Star Wars Rebels. (The ship also made a brief cameo in Rogue One and The Rise of Skywalker.) 

The Ghost’s captain, Hera Syndulla (presumably now a general, if the namecheck in Rogue One is anything to go by) is also sighted briefly, while the final shot of this one-off Ahsoka trailer featured Mandalorian Sabine Wren standing in front of a mural of the Ghost crew in a live-action recreation of the final shot of Star Wars Rebels.

Bespin Bulletin also reported that three new images from the show had debuted at Disney’s APAC presentation, which took place in Singapore on November 30, 2022 – two featured the titular lead while the other showed Mandalorian warrior Sabine Wren. 

Ahsoka on Disney Plus: cast

Here’s what the Ahsoka TV show cast currently looks like:

• Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano
• Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine Wren
• Eman Esfandi as Ezra Bridger
• Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker
• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as TBC
• Ivanna Sakhno as TBC
• Ray Stevenson as TBC
• Chopper as himself

Although Ashley Eckstein voiced Ahsoka throughout The Clone Wars and Rebels, Sin City and Daredevil star Rosario Dawson played the character in The Mandalorian. Dawson will reprise the role in Ahsoka. 

Dawson will be joined by Natasha Liu Bordizzo, replacing Tiya Sircar, who voiced graffiti-loving Mandalorian explosives expert Sabine Wren across four seasons of Star Wars Rebels. The Star Wars Celebration panel also confirmed a return for surly astromech droid C1-10P, better known as Chopper.

In September 2022, the Hollywood Reporter confirmed that Eman Esfandi will play aspiring Jedi Ezra Bridger, a role originated by Taylor Gray in Rebels. But while the aforementioned Star Wars Celebration teaser footage indicated that Hera Syndulla is back in action, no actor has yet been confirmed for the role. There’s also no confirmation on whether the other (surviving) member of the Ghost crew, Lasat muscle Zeb Orrelios, will complete the Star Wars Rebels reunion.

In other casting news, these are particularly good times to be Hayden Christensen. Following up the actor’s spectacular return as Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker in Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Hollywood Reporter reported back in October 2021 that he’ll be part of the Ahsoka cast. As yet, it’s unclear whether he’ll be playing the ‘Sky Guy’ or Vader incarnations of the character – or both. 

There’ll also be as-yet unspecified roles for Birds of Prey’s Mary Elizabeth Winstead (via Hollywood Reporter), Pacific Rim: Uprising’s Ivanna Sakhno (via Deadline) and Punisher: War Zone/Black Sails star Ray Stevenson. This wouldn’t be Stevenson’s first Star Wars gig, as he voiced Mandalorian warrior Gar Saxon – now deceased – in both The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, but the identity of his character remains unknown. 

While a Hollywood Reporter article suggests Stevenson will play a villain in the Ahsoka TV show, their sources claim he’s definitely not Grand Admiral Thrawn, the blue-skinned Star Wars Rebels villain who first appeared in Timothy Zahn’s much-loved series of (now non-canonical) 1990s novels. While the identity of the actor playing Thrawn is currently unknown, fans would definitely be happy if Rebels voice actor Lars Mikkelsen was asked to reprise the role. He was suitably chilling in the animated show, and has a track record playing memorable villains after his appearance in Sherlock. His brother, Mads, is also part of the Star Wars “family”, having played Galen Erso in Rogue One.

And seeing as the Ahsoka TV show exists at a similar point in the Star Wars timeline to The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett (check out our guide to watching Star Wars in order to understand how everything fits together), don’t be surprised if the likes of Katee Sackhoff (Bo-Katan Kryze), Mando (DIn Djarin) and even Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) show up in cameo roles.

Ahsoka on Disney Plus: story

For the benefit of anyone yet to watch the animated Star Wars shows, here’s a brief history of Ahsoka Tano’s life and times.

Having served the Republic with distinction throughout the Clone Wars, she left the Jedi Order under a cloud during season 5. Although she was eventually exonerated for bombing the Jedi Temple – she’d been framed by her friend and fellow Padawan Barriss Offee – she decided not to return, and went out into the galaxy solo.

During the final days of the Clone Wars, she helped Bo-Katan Kryze remove Darth Maul from the Mandalorian throne, and was on her way to return the former Sith Lord to Jedi custody when the Emperor initiated Order 66. With some help from her old friend Captain Rex – whose mind-controlling inhibitor chip she surgically removed – Ahsoka survived the Jedi purge and went into hiding. (One of the episodes of 2022 anthology series Tales of the Jedi shows how an encounter with one of the Empire’s Inquisitors persuaded her to rejoin the fight.) 

Ahsoka turned up again in Star Wars Rebels, set around 15 years after the Emperor came to power. It was eventually revealed that Ahsoka was the mysterious ‘Fulcrum’, an agent who helped pull disparate cells of freedom fighters together to form the Rebel Alliance.

She also fought a fateful duel with her former master. When she removed a portion of Darth Vader’s helmet with her lightsaber – much as Obi-Wan did in the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV show – she became one of the few people in the galaxy to realize his true identity. The Vader/Anakin Skywalker connection wouldn’t become common knowledge across the galaxy for several decades – the secret was eventually leaked to damage Leia Organa’s post-Return of the Jedi political aspirations in Claudia Gray’s 2016 novel Bloodline.

Ahsoka barely made it out of the duel with Vader alive, but she was saved by a future version of Jedi apprentice Ezra Bridger. He pulled her into the ‘World Between Worlds’, a mystical realm where the usual rules of time and space do not apply. By the time of the Rebels epilogue – set some time after Return of the Jedi – Ahsoka had somehow returned to the normal reality of that galaxy far, far away.

Aside from the flashbacks of Tales of the Jedi, her most recent canonical appearances came in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

In The Mandalorian episode ‘The Jedi’, she met Din Djarin (aka The Mandalorian) and Baby Yoda. While communing with the Child, she learned that real name was Grogu, and gave Mando some pointers to help find some other Jedi – it’s now well known that she was referring to Luke Skywalker.

She showed up again in The Book of Boba Fett’s sixth chapter, ‘From the Desert Comes a Stranger’. The episode provided confirmation that Ahsoka knew Luke Skywalker, as she paid him a visit at his new Jedi academy on Ossus. She also counselled Skywalker Jr about Grogu’s training, and told him that he reminded her of his late dad. When Luke asked if he would see her again, she replied with a cryptic “Perhaps”.

So what do we know about the Ahsoka TV show’s story? Well, it’ll have plenty of existing canon to work from, and there’s nobody on the planet who knows how to navigate the Star Wars timeline better than Dave Filoni. During his previous life as supervising director on The Clone Wars, Filoni co-created Ahsoka Tano with George Lucas. He then went on to shepherd her through seven seasons of The Clone Wars and several guest appearances on Rebels. He also directed her episodes of The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

Asked about his experience writing the new show, Filoni told Empire that, “It’s thrilling, I gotta tell you. It’s something you imagine doing for a long time, and then it’s kind of startling when you’re sitting there, and now you have to do it.

“I thought of this adventure for Ahsoka for a long time, and it’s interesting to see how it’s evolved. Years ago, I never would have imagined that it was sprung from a branch of a tree that had anything to do with a guy [like] Din Djarin [aka the Mandalorian], or a child that looks like Yoda. It’s a great lesson for me on how, when you have other creatives like [The Mandalorian showrunner] Jon Favreau, they can help lend such dimension and depth to what you’re doing.”

Going by StarWars.com’s original announcement about the series, it looks like the new series will pick up soon after Ahsoka’s meeting with Mando and Grogu: “After making her long awaited live-action debut in The Mandalorian,” said the site, “Ahsoka Tano’s story will continue in a limited series.”

It’s currently unknown, however, whether that Rebels epilogue takes place before or after Ahsoka showed up in The Mandalorian – though we do know from the aforementioned Star Wars Celebration footage that the animated show’s closing scenes have been recreated in live-action for the new TV show.

“That’s not necessarily chronological,” Filoni told Vanity Fair in November 2020. “I think the thing that people will most not understand is they want to go in a linear fashion, but as I learned as a kid, nothing in Star Wars really works in a linear fashion. You do [Episodes] 4, 5 and 6 and then 1, 2, and 3. So in the vein of that history, when you look at the epilogue of Rebels you don’t really know how much time has passed. So, it’s possible that the story I’m telling in The Mandalorian actually takes place prior to that. Possible. I’m saying it’s possible.”

One thing that both the Rebels epilogue and the Ahsoka TV show will have in common is Mandalorian warrior Sabine Wren. The fact that Natasha Liu Bordizzo will take the character into live-action (first confirmed by Deadline), potentially offers up some clues about the story – as does the more recent announcement that Eman Esfandi will play Ezra Bridger.

In the Rebels finale, Ahsoka and Sabine set out to find their lost friend, assumed to be trapped in the ‘World Between Worlds’. This could also tie in with Ahsoka’s primary mission in her episode of The Mandalorian. There, she revealed that she’s on the hunt for Imperial bigwig Grand Admiral Thrawn, who just happened to be with Bridger when he went missing. 

The way Ahsoka pressed Calodan town magistrate Morgan Elsbeth about the location of her master – aka Thrawn – in The Mandalorian suggested he’s already back in normal space making a nuisance of himself. Maybe Bridger isn’t far behind? And perhaps Ahsoka on Disney Plus will be Star Wars Rebels season 5 in all but name.

We’d be disappointed if we didn’t learn more about Ahsoka’s decision not to train Grogu, an opportunity Luke grabbed with both hands. “Jon [Favreau] and I went back and forth, because if [Ahsoka can’t take Grogu], then who will?” said Filoni in The Art of The Mandalorian: Season Two (h/t The Direct). “Taking care of the Child is not her destiny. That’s not what I’ve been planning for her to do [laughs], so I can’t change it up.”

Clearly that “destiny” will have a major bearing on the new TV show. It’ll also be interesting to see how Anakin Skywalker might fit into the Ahsoka story, seeing as Darth Vader is very much dead at the time the new show is set. It seems most likely that Hayden Christensen will show up in flashbacks to the Jedi/Padawan duo’s Clone Wars days – perhaps in a similar vein to ‘Practice Makes Perfect’, the training-focussed episode of Tales of the Jedi – though it’s also plausible that the redeemed Anakin could appear as a Force ghost giving Ahsoka advice, much as Obi-Wan Kenobi did for Luke.

And while revenge isn’t traditionally the Jedi way, we wouldn’t be surprised if Ahsoka gets to settle a few scores with Barriss Offee. After all, being framed for murder is going to leave a few scars.