“Little things that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of”: The Clone Wars Series Helped Ray Park’s Darth Maul Evolve in Ways The Phantom Menace Never Could

The vast galactic story of Star Wars begins with Episode I: The Phantom Menace – a relatively tame chapter in the extraordinary mythology of George Lucas. By the time The Clone Wars enters the picture, a monumental shift can be recognized within each character who has already begun to be molded toward their destinies. Among them lies a fleeting but unforgettable arc of Darth Maul.

First seen in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, the character arrived just as quickly as he was dispatched to his vicious death – not necessarily in one piece. But an event that was a blip in the grand scheme of things was the point of origin for Darth Maul, a character whose impressive skills as a fighter equipped with an iconic double-bladed lightsaber awed and terrified the audience.

However, given his short-lived arc as a sinister villain in Star Wars: Episode I, it was his return as a shadowy presence in Star Wars: The Clone Wars that turned him into a subject of Senecan tragedy.

The Clone Wars Does Justice to a Deadly Sith Lord

Evolution may be a product of time, but without a necessary cause to back it up, it is simply a nuisance to those who end up on its inevitable path. Darth Maul was one such character whose existence ended even before he could evolve and answer his true calling. But, The Clone Wars proved that wrong by turning the Sith Lord around from a defeated villain to one of the most fearsome creatures ever to step foot in the galaxy.

What began as a partially-hooded, minimally-voiced foil to Qui-Gon Jonn and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace soon turned into a fully fleshed-out arc in the animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Darth Maul was no longer a supervillain who put up one of the best lightsaber fights in Star Wars history but a character whose entire story – from birth to his first kill, from death to resurrection, and every minute in between – was shadowed by tragedy.

Through The Clone Wars, Darth Maul was no longer a two-dimensional character with no past or future. Instead, he was a child of the shadows whose need for revenge was driven by the darkness that stalked him for his entire life – making Maul an integral piece of the Star Wars lore whose arc now hits ten times as hard in the gut than his first appearance on screen in The Phantom Menace.

The Clone Wars Brings Back an Old Star Wars Legend

Despite the hurdles in animation, the Star Wars team unanimously arrived at one conclusion when the story demanded the return of a long-gone Sith Lord, the menacing Darth Maul. The team then wanted to bring back Ray Park from The Phantom Menace, even if it meant having to separately incorporate the physicality of the original actor into the villainous character’s animated model.

Given how Ray Park’s portrayal of Darth Maul was historically integral to the Star Wars lore, animation supervisor Keith Kellogg revealed to Looper in an exclusive interview:

He is Darth Maul. That was so cool. Maul lives as sort of this really great character with a really nice arc going through Clone Wars up through Rebels, when you see him fight Obi-Wan. We really study the movies and what came before us, but we’ve had to create a lot of Maul, because he’s in, I think, eight minutes of the movie.

Certain ways he’ll lift his leg, or he’ll do a double jump, or the foot plant that he’ll do… little things like that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of in terms of what we would do in animation. Even the way he stalks people when he’s Maul — he’d sort of become this kind of predator — to be able to take that and add it to what we already have was really a pretty epic pairing.

The end result was a true exploration of this character who was kidnapped at birth, groomed and brainwashed to become the ultimate, lethal weapon of Darth Sidious, discarded due to his failure, and resurrected as a vicious, blood-thirsty, criminal mastermind who became the most recognizable villain of the franchise, after Darth Vader.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace are available for streaming on Disney+