Skeleton Crew isn’t a show that seemingly set up to answer the grand mysteries of the Star Wars galaxy—it’s an adventure show about kids getting lost in space, not our major insight into what’s next for the galaxy at large, or what’s up with the movers and shakers of intergalactic conflict. But that doesn’t mean the show doesn’t have mystery, and it certainly has a lot of it in the shape of one figure in particular: Jude Law’s peculiar character, Jod Na Nawood.
Na Nawood, Star Wars-as-hell name aside, has been a constant enigma in the run up to the series—is he really a Jedi in hiding? What draws him to helping the kids find their way home in the first place?—but for all the focus as Skeleton Crew‘s primary adult protagonist, we still don’t know all that much about his deal… but at a recent press junket, Law was eager to start peeling back the many layers of Jod Na Nawood to io9.
“There’s a sort of elevated life force in Star Wars, where people are really dealing with the big fight of good and evil over who is basically running the galaxy. And then just as in life on Earth, there are the people that are just surviving,” Law told io9 of Jod’s place in the universe coming into the series. “If you think of the sort of extremes of rebellions and revolutions and battles… a lot of the galaxy is at war. And when you’re at war, people really are having to sort of survive on crumbs—and in there lies some great story, great texture. How are you involved? Are you not involved? Are you just surviving day to day?”
“What’s interesting to me about Jod is he’s clearly in that mire, surviving, looking out for himself, and probably has been for the good part of his life, most of it even,” Law continued. But why is Jod staying at the fringes? “You know, as we’ve hinted at already, he is Force sensitive. So how that comes into his life, and why, and whether he uses it, and whether we’re going to reveal more, is all part of the mystery. But I think this adds a very interesting texture to him.”
One interesting part of what makes Jod such a wild card for Skeleton crew does come into play with his name. It is, according to Law at least, just one identity the man has had over his life. “I must find out which one of them came up with the name,” Law said of Jod’s identity, in reference to Skeleton Crew‘s creators, Jon Watts and Christopher Ford. “One of Jod’s other names is actually taken from a really old early Star Wars comic book. I won’t tell you which one! But yeah, it’s a reference to a character in a very early comic.”
“We do learn that Jod has been called by multiple names [within the first few episodes],” Watts teased to io9. “I like to think of his character having the same conversation [about his name], figuring out like, is that actually his actual name? Or did he make up a Star Wars name too? He thought that ‘Na Nawood’ would sound more Jedi-like.”
“Some of the names when we were developing them, we would port through different languages and find… you would end up kind of changing it and warping it,” Ford added. “I think that’s how [Dave Filoni] came up with Ahsoka, that it was from maybe like, a Sanskrit name or something. So actually ‘Na Nawood,’ maybe someone will figure out, does have a different language origin and means something.”
It won’t be much longer before we get to start unfurling the mystery ourself—Star Wars: Skeleton Crew begins streaming tonight, December 2, on Disney+.
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