When Disney scrapped the Expanded Universe, Star Wars fans were forced to accept that they wouldn’t end up seeing many of their favourite characters from various video games and novels in future movies. The Clone Wars managed to remain part of canon though, and it has now been confirmed that the animated series will tie into Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One.

Forest Whitaker’s mysterious character has been officially outed as being Saw Gerrera, a man we last saw fighting alongside the young Anakin Skywalker when his planet (Onderon) was invaded by a droid army of Separatists. He first appeared in season five’s “A War on Two Fronts”, which aired in October 2012 and could be seen there battling alongside his sister.

As Entertainment Weekly points out in their report, “While it wouldn’t be right to spoil what happens to their characters in that story arc, which can be caught up with now on Netflix, suffice to say that Saw pays a steep cost for his resistance, and remains mistrustful of any authority except his own for the rest of his days. There never will be a peacetime for him.”

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“Consider him kind of a battered veteran who leads a band of Rebel extremists,” Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy explained in an interview with the site. “He’s on the fringe of the Rebel Alliance. Even [they] are a little concerned about him. He’s off on his own,” she added.

This is a fascinating development, and it will be now be fun to see if any other characters from the prequel era are mentioned in Rogue One, especially as this movie takes place only around twenty years after the events of Revenge of the Sith (meaning that at least a few other familiar faces could return in some capacity a little older than when we last saw them).