Anna Daniels
According to a new rumor, a secret Star Wars show centered on the comic character of Doctor Aphra has not only been given the greenlight, but it’s apparently already filming. The production is supposedly a collaboration between Lucasfilm and Marvel, and it will be debuting on Disney+ potentially within the next year.
While the future of the Star Wars movies post-The Rise of Skywalker still hasn’t been publicly revealed, the franchise seems content with shifting its attention to television (for now, anyway). The Mandalorian is about to wrap up its first season, Ewan McGregor is returning for an Obi-Wan Kenobi show, and Diego Luna is coming back to reprise his role as rebel spy Cassian Andor in a Rogue One prequel series – and those are just the live-action programs we know about so far.
But now Jason Ward, who has a reliable track record of breaking Star Wars news at his site MakingStarWars, gave an interview to Inverse in which he says that a new show is already underway:
“A new Star Wars show is starting about now that nobody even knows about…I’m hearing it’s a Lucasfilm-Marvel venture with both companies teaming up to bring a Star Wars show to the small screen.”
Ward says the new show is about Doctor Aphra, the character who debuted in the pages of Marvel’s Star Wars comics back in 2015 and eventually got her own spinoff title. You can read an in-depth profile of her over at Wookieepedia, but she’s an archeologist who was selected by Darth Vader to work for him. As a true shade of grey in the Star Wars galaxy, someone who proves to be comfortable working with and betraying both the Imperials and the Rebels, the scrappy, selfish anti-hero has quickly become a fan favorite. She’s constantly walking up to the line of failure, but always seems to be able to pull through at the last minute, and though she’s been described as the Indiana Jones of the Star Wars universe, she was evidently conceived as the dark mirror version of Jones.
Oh, and she’s also one of the few canonically queer characters in Star Wars lore. As creator Kieron Gillen once explained to StarWars.com:
“I normally say Aphra’s a lesbian. I’ve never written her with any romantic interest in men. There’s definitely some people who think Vader and Aphra were flirting but I’m not going to get into that…I’ve written her primarily romantically interested in women. I think that would be fair to say. Star Wars doesn’t really have the terminology that we do either. One of the things we wrote inside the first arc was that homophobia as we know it doesn’t really exist in the Star Wars universe. No one raises their eyebrow, no one seems surprised when it happens. It’s kind of just something that’s there, so the way that they process sexuality has got to be different anyway, and how they choose to identify, as well.”
That’s a potentially intriguing character to get her own TV show, and it would make sense that Lucasfilm would want to keep its development quiet to make sure that everyone’s focus is on The Rise of Skywalker. I suspect that the dam will begin to crack once that movie is released, and if this rumor is true, I’m very curious about the creative team behind this series and, of course, who will be playing the lead role. We’ll keep you posted when we learn more.
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