I had the great pleasure of interviewing Vanessa Marshall (Hera from “Star Wars: Rebels”) and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca the Wookiee) at Dragon Con this year.
I interviewed them both over the course of two hours over two days. I’ll be honest, these two hours of listening to these two were amazing, but there were two stories more than the others that demand your attention.
The first came from Vanessa Marshall.
I asked her about her accent on the show. All the Twi’leks on “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” have French accents, including the character who is Hera’s father, Cham Syndulla. I asked her if there was a discussion about using that accent for her character, and she surprised me by saying that there was an in-story reason about why Hera doesn’t have that accent and that there were episodes in Season Two of “Star Wars Rebels” that will address this very question. That is a very interesting tidbit.
The other is Peter Mayhew telling the story about the Wookiee’s pants on Endor while shooting “Return of the Jedi.” I’d read that men in orange vests had to accompany him around the Redwood Forest because he would be an enticing target for hunters, but the story as he told it, to “set the record straight,” was far better.
You can listen to it in the player above, on the Full of Sith website, or on iTunes, Stitcher, or any other podcast platform.