A few months ago, Star Wars: The Mandalorian star Katee Sackhoff confirmed that fellow Mandalorian Axe Woves was set to meet his untimely death at the end of season 2 of the series. This was the reason he was not seen in the finale, and why he was back for the third season.
Axe Woves actor Simon Kassianides, revealed in a new interview with The Holo Files that his character was set to meet his fate in Chapter 11: The Heiress. However, during post-production Jon Favreau had a change of plans, and scrapped the scenes that were shot from the finished product.
“The way I look at it is that it’s really the storytellers’ story to tell, so Jon and Dave and all the guys that create the show,” he says. “They’re such experts in deciding everything, and they see how they want to shape things.”
“I can’t really speak to [deciding to make Axe Woves live], because I think I was just mostly excited that it didn’t go that way. I do remember them calling me saying, ‘Would you like to come back and film?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, cool.'”
“It was beyond the season [2] finale having been locked, so it was too late to be inserted into a finale,” Kassianides continues. “So, there was a lot of the ‘Where was he? What were you doing? Why weren’t you in it?’ Now the cat’s out the bag.”
Woves also somehow managed to survive the events of season 3, despite it looking like his character might be making a heel turn, and then possibly making a heroic sacrifice. Instead, he survived the events of the finale, and looks to be returning for future episodes of the series.
“Jon and I sat down and he said, ‘How do you feel about this arc and how would you feel about saying something?’ And he said to try ‘For Mandalore!’ And well, you know the rest is history, but it was an amazing moment, thinking about them all returning, especially the back story that I built into that moment in terms of what it meant for that character.”
