Sam Witwer Promises Darth Maul ‘Shadow Lord’ Series Will Not Portray Villain As “Misunderstood”, Instead Have Him Ask “If I’m The Joker And Batman’s Dead, What Does That Feel Like?”
In ostensibly hoping to try and assuage at least one very understandable fear about the Disney Plus series, lead voice actor Sam Witmer has promised that the upcoming Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord that rather than attempting to convince viewers that the villain is “misunderstood”, the series will instead see him wrestle with his own Joker/Batman-style dilemma.
Witmer, whose Star Wars history has seen him not serve as the post-Phantom Menace voice of Darth Maul, having portrayed the Zabrak ever since his return in the the Clone Wars CGI animated series, but also lend his likeness to The Force Unleashed duology’s Starkiller, offered this assurance regarding the series’ narrative during a recent appearance on his fellow franchise star Katee Sackhoff’s The Sackhoff Show podcast.
Offering his host a tease of the upcoming animated series, Witmer told Sackhoff that Shadow Lord was “a show about ‘bad guys vs. worse guys’ – and our bad guys are still bad guys.”
“Like this isn’t going to be a show where you find out, “Oh, Maul is just a real teddy bear man,” said the actor. “That guy, he’s just misunderstood, you have to understand, if you have coffee with him he’s really cool.’ We’re not doing that. But the idea is, in fact, that even though he’s a bad guy, the fun of it is going, ‘Right, but is he as bad as Sidious or Vader?’ And the answer is actually ‘No’.”
“From the Sith perspective this guy has flaws, and these flaws are the things you’re talking about, the humanity that seeps in at various points,” explained Witmer. “And some of this is humanity he did not have maybe early in Clone Wars, but because of things that happened to him, he’s rethought a lot of things.”
“For example,” Witmer then offered up, “this is a guy who knew that the Empire was coming, and he was part of that, he was supposed to be the part of the Clone Wars, he was supposed to work with his Master, and they were going to bring about the destruction of the Republic and the destruction of his hated enemy, the Jedi Order. He was raised to hate them, he was he trained his whole life to destroy them, well now we have a show where, okay, all of that was done, but Maul, yeah you killed a bunch of Jedi during the Clone Wars, but you did not work with Sidious. You didn’t know the whole plan and in fact you got so scared about his plan that you tried to stop it at the last second [as portrayed in the 2014 Dark Horse comic book series Darth Maul – Son of Dathomir Vol. 1, itself adapted from a Clone Wars animated series storyline that was scrapped due to the series initial 2013 cancellation].
“Now the Empire is here, which Maul would have known that was his Master’s intent, but now that he’s seeing it, he’s like, ‘Is this what he had in mind? Because this isn’t what I thought it would be. This is a little scary,” he further detailed. “Maul comes from a a time of swords, and sorcery, and magic, and knights, and now all of that color is being sucked out of the universe by this mechanized empire,” Witmer elaborated. “And Maul’s like ‘Is this right? Is this the universe that we were trying to build?'”
“And it also becomes a little bit more boring when that’s the universe of the Empire,” Witmer next posited. “Look at the Stormtrooper division in comparison to the Clones. The Clones learned under the Jedi to become their own people, and stuff like that, but the Stormtroopers – whenever we performed them, and I’ve performed a lot of Stormtroopers over the year,s we try to perform them as if they have this soulless nature. They’re always just sort of like this, and what if when they’re talking to each other, they’re talking about some weird mundane mechanized stuff. Their humanity and their individuality has been pulled away and sucked away by this Empire.”
Closing out his tease, the Darth Maul voice actor told his Bo-Katan actress host, “So, you have a guy who comes from the time of magic, but times have changed. And then he was born and raised to destroy the Jedi, but now they’re gone. And he’s seeing the alternative and going ‘Is this better? I’m not sure this is better. And also, boy, how do I feel now that I’m the Joker and Batman‘s dead? What does that feel like?”
Finally pressed by Sackhoff as to whether Shadow Lord‘s Joker and Batman-esque narrative would feature “any good guys”, Witmer asserted, “Yes, there’s a lot of new characters in this show. You have characters who are absolutely far more moral than Maul that get caught up in some stuff, sometimes, in fact, with him, and the interesting thing is, can they work together? How do they work together? Do things go wrong? It’s a very tension-filled story that we’re telling.
At current, the animated Darth Maul – Shadow Lord series is set to begin questioning the Empire’s rise sometime in 2026.
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