It goes without saying that Sabine has been and will continue to be a main focal point in Season 3 of Star Wars Rebels. Actress Tiya Sircar, who voices Sabine in the animated series, revealed recently that she had a pretty good handle on her character’s backstory right from the jump.
We’ll learn more about Sabine when Season 3 returns from break on Feb. 18 with the episode titled “Legacy of Mandalore.”
“At the very beginning, when, I think, Vanessa [Marshall, voice of Hera], Freddie [Prinze, Jr. voice of Kanan], and I had our very first meeting with Dave and had our first recording session, we sat down and basically had a chat about our characters and a little background about each of them and the dynamic between the characters, and I think it was then, which was years ago at this point, he told me some of her … he told me a version of her backstory,” Sircar told ComicBook.com in an interview. “I was so intrigued and he said, ‘We’re going to get to it, but not just yet. That’s going to be over several seasons, hopefully, we’ll flesh this out but this is basically what happened to you and why you’re here.'”
Of course, the actress did not know it would be two and a half seasons before she got to reveal what she knew. She started asking him questions right away and he said she’d have to wait a couple of seasons. She did say the story evolved, though the basics stayed the same.
“It was this huge, huge secret that I didn’t even know if the Ghost crew knew. Only half of that [what she was originally told] is now what was revealed, because it was a different scenario with my family members, or which family members and what happened,” Sircar explained, “but the basic storyline about the weapon and who the Empire was going to use the weapon against and that being why I left, and carrying this tremendous guilt; all of that was given to me from the very, very beginning.”
That’s breaking showrunner Dave Filoni’s notorious rule of not giving his actors too much of the story in advance, only providing them with “exactly what we need,” she achknowledged. “He’s so deliberate and he knows exactly what’s what, so if he feels like I need to know something, I feel confident that that’s what I need to know and nothing more.”
In this case, she said the fan in her was thinking, “I want to know what happened!” but she had the right amount of information for her performance.
It brings more weight to Sabine’s line when she gets her jetpack, and her backstory starts to come out, “Finally,” that’s for sure.
