Gaten Matarazzo got to play Sig Greebling in LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, fulfilling the star’s ambition to appear in his favourite film series, a franchise his character Dustin Henderson often quotes in Stranger Things, the series that launched Matarazzo’s career.
On the season four premiere of the latter, Matarazzo’s Dustin Henderson quoted Han Solo’s famous line, “Never tell me the odds,” which was a retort to C-3PO’s mathematical skepticism amid Han’s daring asteroid field navigation in The Empire Strikes Back. Well, Matarazzo — as his Force-powered Lego Star Wars character Sig Greebling — can now say that he’s also been on the receiving end of C-3PO’s odds. Anthony Daniels reprised his legacy character on Rebuild the Galaxy, only it was an ominous bounty hunter version of his protocol droid, since Sig reconfigured the very nature of the Star Wars galaxy by removing “the Cornerstone” (a glowing Lego) from a lost Jedi temple. Thus, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit’s four-part miniseries explores many fun role reversals and dynamic changes, such as Jedi Jabba the Hutt and Darth Jar Jar.
The New Jersey native’s admission into Star Wars is reminiscent of the franchise jump that his dear friend, Atlanta housemate, brother-in-cinephilia and fellow Stranger Things castmate Finn Wolfhard has also made. His enlistment as a Ghostbuster in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) and Frozen Empire (2024), following their Ghostbusters Halloween costumes on season two of Stranger Things, is another example of becoming the very thing they once referenced. Matarazzo also gets to say that he toplined a voice cast that features one Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.
“To play one character for nearly half a century and be widely known for that one character, I can imagine it’s fulfilling, but very, very exhausting. So to have [Mark Hamill] come back and do this is really, really kind,” Matarazzo tells The Hollywood Reporter. “He elevates the show so much, and he also accentuates how brilliant the show is since people from the original trilogy wanted to be a part of it. We’re eternally grateful.”
Matarazzo has been a Star Wars fan for as long as he can remember, and his introduction came at age six by way of George Lucas and Dave Filoni’s The Clone Wars animated series that aired on the Cartoon Network from 2008 to 2013. When Matarazzo’s family caught on to what he was watching, they quickly intervened so that he could instead experience the franchise’s impactful lore through the original trilogy first.
“I’m a Star Wars fiend, and so when I was approached, I was like, ‘I don’t care if the script is dog shit; I’m doing it.’ And, of course, the script wasn’t that,” Matarazzo says. “So everything just fell into place to be a full-blown dream project that was basically a fan film. Lucasfilm let [showrunners] Dan [Hernandez] and Benji [Samit] get away with pretty much whatever they wanted, which was a miracle in and of itself.”
Matarazzo’s producer and director on Stranger Things, Shawn Levy, is also currently in development on a Star Wars movie. Naturally, the young cast has ribbed Levy about it, but no one has performed an impromptu audition by mimicking a lightsaber fight à la Dustin and Steve (Joe Keery) in season three. Matarazzo thinks Levy is exactly what Star Wars needs, and he’d, of course, love to be a part of his project in any capacity.
“We’ve all been making little bits about it, for sure … He would bring such a levity and a joy to Star Wars, and that’s what the franchise definitely needs right now. So I’m here,” Matarazzo says with a laugh.
Read the interview in full here, and stream all four pieces of LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild The Galaxy on Disney+ now.
