When Obi-Wan Kenobi cut Darth Maul in half over 25 years ago, most of us thought that was it. Maul was clearly one of the coolest and most interesting Star Wars characters ever, but George Lucas chose to kill him. However, as fate would have it, the character has now come back time and time again, in large part due to Lucas’s protégé Dave Filoni, and soon, we’re gonna get way more of him than we ever thought possible.
Maul: Shadow Lord, a new animated series, was announced at Star Wars Celebration Japan last month and it’ll bring the former Sith Lord back to the forefront in a big, big way. Speaking with fellow Star Wars star Katee Sackhoff, voice of Maul Sam Witwer revealed a few broad clues about what we can expect from the show, including how Maul perceives the plan formulated by his former master, Darth Sidious.
“This is a guy who knew that the Empire was coming, and he was part of that,” Witwer said on The Sackhoff Show. “He was supposed to be 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 trained his whole life to destroy them. Well, now we have a show where, OK, 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.”
“Now the Empire’s here, which Maul would have known that that was his master’s intent,” he continues. “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…’ Maul comes from 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. And Maul’s like, ‘Is this right? Is this the universe that we were trying to build?’”
That’s fascinating, is it not? Seeing the grand plans of Emperor Palpatine through the eyes of someone who worked with him before Darth Vader. Before Count Dooku. Before Grand Moff Tarkin or Grand Admiral Thrawn. Someone who was there at the beginning and is now confused about what he thought the plan was, and what it ended up being.
But, as Witwer explains, that’s kind of the aim of Maul: Shadow Lord.
“It truly is a show about bad guys versus worse guys,” he said. “And our bad guys are still bad guys. This isn’t going to be a show where you go, oh, you find out Maul is just a real teddy bear, man. He’s just misunderstood… But the idea is, in fact, that even though he’s a bad guy, 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 humanity that seeps in at various points. 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.”
Rethinking things is part of what is making Maul: Shadow Lord work too. Witwer explained that, as he was working with Filoni on Clone Wars and Rebels, they’d come up with ideas for Maul that they loved, but couldn’t fit in the show. Now, all those ideas are coming back.
“There were ideas that I had back in Clone Wars that I would present to Dave, or even in Rebels,” Witwer said. “And I also know things that Dave wanted to do. And Dave would go, ‘We’re going to cut this part out of the script that I have that I like so much because this isn’t Maul’s show.’ Or I’d say, ‘Dave, what if this happens?’ And he goes, ‘It’s not Maul’s show. You can’t go into that little level of detail. We’re seeing this from Ezra’s perspective or Ahsoka’s perspective.’ And every time he said, ‘This isn’t Maul’s show,’ it never occurred to me that Maul could have a show. So I just took those ideas and I’m like, well, I guess we’ll never see that. And now he’s like, well, it’s Maul’s show.’”
You can watch the full clip below and keep an eye out for Maul: Shadow Lord in 2026.
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