Martin Scorsese's Mandalorian & Grogu Character Has A Heartfelt Origin Story
If you started to think less about Endor’s moons and a little more about Killers of the Flower Moon at some point early on during The Mandalorian and Grogu, it’s probably because you heard the voice of the one and only Martin Scorsese.
The legendary director and “Absolute Cinema” icon pops up in the first half hour of the movie in a surprise voice cameo as the four-armed deli owner who Din Djarin encounters on the remote planet of Shakari—because hey, why the hell not?
In this feature, I’ll take a quick look at both how this bizarre planetary collision came about and the rather sweet back story behind the character’s name. Read on to learn a bit more about all that and use the guide to find out where to stream the movies and TV shows I mention on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
How Martin Scorsese Ended Up in Star Wars
When Disney acquired Star Wars from George Lucas in 2012, it didn’t take long before some of Hollywood’s biggest names started queuing up for parts, and not only for the most prominent roles.
In The Force Awakens alone, both Daniel Craig and Simon Pegg appeared. However, most viewers at the time barely noticed—the James Bond star played a Stormtrooper who was cheekily called JB-007, and Pegg (achieving a lifelong dream) got to play Unkar Plutt, the junk dealer whom Ray deals with on Jakku.
When you think about it, Scorsese isn’t even the first great director to become canon in the Star Wars universe. That honour actually belongs to Werner Herzog, the famously deadpan German who played The Client in Season 1 of The Mandalorian. That show, like this movie, was the brainchild of Jon Favreau. If Herzog and Scorsese’s appearances can be attributed to anything, it is probably at least partially down to Favreau’s reputation as one of the most liked players in Hollywood.
The Favreau/Scorsese Connection
The Favreau/Scorsese friendship actually goes all the way back to Favreau’s 2001 movie Made—an L.A. crime comedy in which Scorsese appeared as himself. More recently, Favreau appeared in a small role in The Wolf of Wall Street—he played Manny Riskin, the lawyer to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in the second half of the movie. Aside from occasionally taking on supporting parts like this (he’s also, of course, Happy Hogan in the MCU). However, Favreau is not only better known as a director these days, but he is also arguably one of the most influential blockbuster filmmakers of the last 20 years.
He might not have the name recognition and awards to match that lofty status, but he can certainly claim considerable credit for launching both the MCU (he directed Iron Man in 2008) as well as Disney’s hugely profitable live action remake series (having also directed The Jungle Book in 2016). Considering the GoodFellas director’s famously contentious comments about Marvel in 2019, this new collaboration represents a low-key full circle moment for the two of them.
Whether this means that Scorsese has changed his mind about franchise movies, I’m not so sure: having been around for half a century, Star Wars is historical in a way that the MCU can’t compare to yet, and we know how much Marty geeks out on cinema history—so if we’re hoping for a Marty variant to pop up in Doomsday this December, it’s probably better not to hold our breath.
Why Martin Scorsese’s Mandalorian Character Is Called Hugo Darant
Given that Mando and Grogu is probably the most kid-friendly live-action movie we’ve seen so far in the Star Wars universe, it’s fitting that Favreau decided to name Scorsese’s character Hugo Darant. This is, of course, a nod to the director’s gorgeous 2011 movie Hugo, which tells the story of an orphan’s adventures in 1930s Paris.
This movie is especially significant to Scorsese as it was his first project made with younger audiences in mind. Speaking at the time of its release, the director revealed that he wanted to make something his daughter Francesca (who you might know from TikTok, and who was 11 at the time) could watch. “Having a child later in life… brought me back to the initial impulse to make movies,” Marty explained, “we always joke around and say “make a film your kid could see for once.” That wasn’t the only reason for making the picture but it did help.”
Hugo is a movie with things to say about the history of cinema, of course, but it feels much closer to something Spielberg would make than movies like Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. With all that nice stuff in mind, naming the character Hugo was an endearing touch by Favreau.
Will Hugo Darant Return?
Given how his interaction with Din Djarin ends, the possibility seems as likely as a standalone Jar Jar movie—but hey, stranger things have happened.
