**Warning Spoilers for Solo: A Star Wars Story Below**
Lucasfilm and Disney’s Solo: A Star Wars Story is officially out today in theaters across the United States. There was quite a bit of speculation on whether or not we would some potential cameos in the film. Maybe the most rumored cameo was that of the fearsome bounty hunter Boba Fett. Others suspected we might see Jabba the Hutt. However, neither of those two infamous Star Wars villains appeared the film.
Instead Solo: A Star Wars Story featured a cameo from the fearsome Darth Maul.
You might be thinking, ‘Darth Maul, really? Didn’t he die in The Phantom Menace?’ If you’ve only been watching the Star Wars movies that would be a pretty safe assumption. However, Darth Maul was resurrected and given new life in the animated television show Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Well, he wasn’t technically resurrected, but he survived the nasty fall that Obi-Wan Kenobi gave him at the end of The Phantom Menace.
Darth Maul resurfaces when his brother Savage Opress discovers him living in a trash heap on Lotho Minor.
https://youtu.be/M9SQmDqaBJs
The two brothers would go on to build a criminal empire throughout the Star Wars universe. In fact, Maul and Opress would unite the Shadow Collective and then ally themselves with the militant splinter faction to conquer the Mandalorian home planet of Mandalore. He would even kill Obi-Wan Kenobi’s love and the former ruler of Mandalore, Duchess Satine Kryze.
However, his rule over Mandalore would be short lived as the Emperor decided to confront Savage Opress and Darth Maul personally.
The Emperor would kill Opress, but promised he had other uses for Darth Maul. One of those uses was using Darth Maul to kill another potential rival in Mother Talzin. Mother Talzin was an extremely powerful Dark Side user who had imbued Darth Maul and Savage Opress with the Dark Side. Maul would survive the attack against Mother Talzin.
It’s unclear what happens to him in between the attack on Mother Talzin and his appearance in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Star Wars Rebels, another animated Star Wars television show, indicated Maul had been living on the Sith world of Malachor in the hopes of unlocking a superweapon stored at the heart of the Sith temple on the planet.
However, it appears Darth Maul got back up to his old ways and began organizing the criminal underworld once again and taking control of at least one of the prominent crime syndicates in Red Dawn, which are heavily featured in Solo: A Star Wars Story.