Giancarlo Esposito Was A Darksaber Liability In The Mandalorian
"Star Wars" fans know that there are few things more ridiculously fun than playing around with toy lightsabers, so it's probably pure joy to get to swing around the saber props on the set of a "Star Wars" movie or tv show. (The blasters are probably pretty darn fun, too — just ask Laura Dern!) So when it came to filming the big fight in the finale of "The Mandalorian," Giancarlo Esposito understandably wanted to do it himself. Esposito told Kelly Clarkson (via SyFy) that when he got to set and saw the much younger, smaller stunt performer that would be appearing as him opposite stuntman Lateef Crowder as Din Djarin, he stepped in and trained to do it instead.
One big difference between actors doing their own stunts and trained stunt performers is that the latter know how to pull their thrusts and swings with a saber just enough while still selling the action. It turns out that while Esposito did a great job of getting the viciousness of the fight across, he did so at the expense of multiple prop Darksabers.
Don't break the last Darksaber!
Esposito had a great time filming the sequence and even managed to create a pretty cool improv moment when he failed to block an attack and fell before jumping back to his feet with his saber slashing wildly, but he also started going through prop Darksabers like Grogu goes through frog eggs. The prop master was apparently handing them over to the exuberant actor without letting people know that they were starting to get low, and before anyone knew it, they were down to a single Darksaber:
"He comes over to me and says, [panting] 'I just want you to know, I just have one more. You've gotta be careful.' Because you want to pull your shots, you want to be really careful. But you [also] have to make it look good. We made it through. I got a great, great scene and I learned a lot."
One can only imagine how stressful it was knowing that they were down to the very last Darksaber and that breaking it could cost them both money and valuable filming time, but Esposito managed to pull it off and gave fans one seriously sick "Star Wars" swordfight. The Darksaber is one of the coolest items in the entire extended "Star Wars" universe, so I hope that the final prop version was put away somewhere safe so we can all see it in a museum one day.