Trust me, you're gonna want to talk about "The Lawless," the last episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars' Season 5 to feature Darth Maul and his apprentice Savage Opress. In fact, Lucasfilm and Hollywood.com knew you would have so much to say, that we've set up a live chat on Google Hangouts Saturday at 1:30 p.m. ET/10:30 a.m. PT with actors Sam Witwer (Maul), Matt Lanter (Anakin), Ashley Eckstein (Ahsoka), and supervising director Dave Filoni, to discuss the episode's unbelievable revelations. Tomorrow you yourself will have a chance to ask a question you've been dying to have answered. Today, though, we've pre-gamed the chat with an in-depth interview with Witwer, who's majorly creeped out — and entertained — everyone in our galaxy and that Galaxy Far, Far Away with his virtuoso vocal performance as Maul. He takes us through the two episodes we've already seen, "Eminence" and "Shades of Reason," talks about that little matter with Jon Favreau's Pre Vizsla that happened last week, and teases arc-capper, "The Lawless," in which Maul has a Sith reunion with his old master, Darth Sidious. He also sheds hints about Maul's ultimate fate and long-term impact on the show. Warning: There be epicness ahead.
Hollywood.com: Let's start with the first episode of the Maul/Mandalorian arc, "Eminence." It’s also possibly the first Clone Wars episode ever to be seen entirely through the perspective of the villains.
Sam Witwer: Yes, indeed. I loved that aspect of it, and it was a strangely challenging episode to do because it was so talky. It’s the first episode with Maul that’s just a character episode, just a bunch of guys talking to each other. So if those guys aren’t interesting, we lose.
HW: With what we now know from the follow-up, "Shades of Reason," it's pretty much a given that Maul and Pre Vizsla were playing each other the whole time, right?
SW: Oh, from the beginning for sure. Look at Pre Vizsla’s face when Maul starts choking Katee Sackhoff’s character Bo Katan. He has this look on his face like he was hoping something like this would happen. And when Maul leaves the room, Vizsla and Katan exchange a look like, “Yeah, this is our guy.” The way I read that is that they’re realizing that if they want to retake Mandalore they have to have the Force on their side, because Satine is supported by her old boyfriend, Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi. So how the hell do they counter that?
HW: By the end of "Eminence," however, the Mandalorians already seem ready to get rid of Maul.
SW: Well, the fact that Maul started out as a little bit of a team player and as time went on he became more arrogant and really ended up showing his cards as far as the disrespect he has, or the lack of respect, he has for the Mandalorians, that was a fun thing to see. When you look at the early conversations between Vizsla and Maul, there was a mutual respect there and it takes no time for that to become simmering animosity beneath the surface.
HW: It's hard to believe that when "The Lawless" airs, wrapping up this arc, it'll only be the fifth episode in which we've seen Maul. What do you make of his transformation so far?
SW: Dave and I from the very beginning talked about this storyline way back when we were doing the "Maul in a cave" episodes. We knew how he would evolve, and it would require Maul to be different every time you saw him, to be evolving all the time. From madness, to gaining some of his humanity back but really being full of rage, to simmering down on that a bit, to now evolving to this strategic and diplomatic place. So when we first aired the insane Maul stuff some people loved it, but others said, “Hey, that’s not Darth Maul!” To which I can now say to them, “Hey, it’s not good storytelling if we just give you Darth Maul right away, if we don’t deal with the consequences of him being cut in half and left behind.” There’s gotta be a major cost involved. So when people made those comments, what we wanted to say was, “Hey guys, give it a chance. You don’t judge a movie by the first five minutes.” Now he’s resembling the Darth Maul we know from The Phantom Menace. He cuts down Pre Vizsla as ruthlessly as he does Qui-Gon Jinn. And yet there’s even so much more to him now. We know now that there is this madness underneath. We know he has this incredible mind that no one has previously seen. We’re into the good part of the story now.
HW: In "Eminence" and "Shades of Reason" we saw a degree of leadership in Maul that we never got to glimpse in Phantom Menace.
SW: On The Clone Wars, we had to show that Maul was capable of being a general. Darth Sidious chose him to be his apprentice and trained him well. Maul wasn’t just a mindless hitman. And this was the version of the character that I’d been waiting to do for a long time. I mean, it started with Filoni telling me he needed Maul to be like Gollum, and when I read the script I said we’ve also got a little Apocalypse Now here. He’s also Col. Kurtz. Dave agreed. So Maul became the combination of Gollum and Col. Kurtz, with a little bit of Peter Serafinowicz as Maul from Phantom Menace. Now, though, we've seen a change.
NEXT: How Darth Maul has become an intellectual character. And also, how he may have inspired Darth Sidious to keep in faith in Vader even after that little swan-dive into a volcano.