Star Wars Rebels Almost Made The Force Unleashed's Starkiller Into An Inquisitor
"Star Wars Rebels" is one of the best things to ever happen to "Star Wars." This is an animated show that has become essential to understanding the overall franchise: a show with a great ensemble, different-looking lightsabers, a fantastic fight between Maul and Obi-Wan, and which shone a light on the origins of the Rebellion years before "Andor."
But before "Rebels," there was "Star Wars: The Force Unleashed." This action-adventure video game tells an original story about "Starkiller," born Galen Marek. He is the child of a Jedi who is taken in by Darth Vader and trained as his secret apprentice to track down and kill any Jedi who survived Order 66 — much like the Inquisitors that would later become canon. Years later, Vader gives his apprentice a new task — to plant the seeds for what will become the Rebel Alliance, which Vader will then use to overthrow the Emperor.
At the time, this felt like a great idea, as it tied together different eras of "Star Wars" while also providing an original story. Starkiller proved quite popular with audiences, who wanted to see the character turn up in one of the canon pieces of media. While it was too late for him to appear in "The Clone Wars," he did almost show up in "Rebels" as part of Vader's Inquisitorius.
Sam Witwer, who performed the role of Starkiller in "The Forced Unleashed" and also voiced Maul in "Rebels," has spoken about the character almost making the leap to TV. In a video on Cameo (via YouTube), Witwer confirmed that "Dave [Filoni ]at one point, when he was doing 'Rebels,' thought about including [Starkiller] as an Inquisitor."
Revenge of the Sith
Of course, this didn't end up happening. It makes sense, as Starkiller is a very difficult character to pull in TV and film. For one, he is essentially a big power fantasy: a character that gives players the ability to embody not just a Force user, but the most powerful Force user, one even Vader would fear. In the most memorable scene in the game, Starkiller literally rips an entire Star Destroyer out of the sky with the Force. Try that on for size, Yoda! To include him in "Rebels" would mean seriously scaling down the character's powers, which would do him and the games a disservice.
There's also the "Vader's secret apprentice" thing, which works wonderfully on a game focused on said apprentice, but less so if Starkiller is just another villain in a much larger show. As cool as the Inquisitors were — cool enough to show up on both "Obi-Wan Kenobi," and "Ahsoka" — they kind of blended all together, so Starkiller would be quite forgettable. Even as the only Inquisitor, his backstory is too big to just be another character.
"Starkiller was the Inquisitor, the Grand Inquisitor, or all of the Inquisitors really," Witwer reflected. "But he was also Kanan and Ezra." While the actor thinks that "you could definitely figure out how to fit a story around it" (and even threw out a few ideas for what that story should look like), he also acknowledged that forging a place for Darth Vader's secret apprentice in "Rebels" would have been "tricky."
Still, fans have never stopped believing, even making up wild theories about Starkiller being alive (despite several deaths) in the time of "Ahsoka" in the form of the mysterious and kind of useless Marrok.