Rosario Dawson, speaking alongside co-stars Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Natasha Liu Bordizzo, spoke to EW’s Dagobah Dispatch podcast about all the work she put in to mastering Ahsoka’s trademark double lightsaber technique.
“Doing two hours a day, seven days a week, was pretty intense,” says Dawson. “And then you add on when we were actually filming and doing these different battles and having to continue to studying it.”
Ahsoka also presented a special challenge in training due to her unique fighting style. “She is ambidextrous,” notes Dawson. “That was just a lot to kind of own.”
There was also one other big difference between the character and the actress. “She’s so fierce from the very beginning,” says Dawson. “It was never a question about whether she capable. She meets every single match just so head on. There’s no hesitancy from her whatsoever, and that’s really different from someone who’s learning martial arts in their 40s who’s trying to protect their face.”
But the actress and student notes that after enough work, something clicked. “There was definitely a moment a few months into the training where I just felt it land in my body in a way. I remember when it clicked in where I really felt grounded in her and some of the stuff started feeling more familiar and seamless. That’s when I really felt like I locked into Ahsoka.”
Of course, she had a lot of help, including stunt coordinator Ming Qiu, whose approval carried the most weight. “I was grateful for the team of people that we have,” says Dawson. “And to have someone like Ming, who actually started nodding and going, ‘Okay, this can work.’ When she said, ‘This one did not make my eyes hurt,’ that was the first compliment that I got, and I think I cried. It took a lot of effort on our part to make look easy, and that felt really remarkable because of that discerning eye.”
Read more at the link below and mark August 31st in your diaries as a tentative date for the first episode of the Ahsoka Disney+ series.
