Jim Cummings teases the possibility of Hondo Ohnaka’s return

Dragon Con was this past weekend, and one of the guests in attendance was Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels voice actor of Hondo Ohnaka, Jim Cummings.

On one of the panels, Cummings took questions from the audience. One question was about the possibility of seeing Hondo’s return in live-action. The Direct was in attendance and they reported Cumming’s response:

"“Probably, yes and yes, but they haven’t talked to me about it. I don’t know why, I mean… yeah. I’m there. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”"

Hondo Ohnaka first appeared in the season one episode of Clone Wars “Dooku Captured” and has been a fan favorite ever since. In the Season 2 trailer for The Bad Batch, another character with ties to Hondo, the Jedi youngling Gungi, was a surprise reveal. Gungi and Hondo worked together in the youngling arc of Clone Wars, specifically in the episode “A Necessary Bond” to fight off General Grievous. Perhaps this past between Gungi and the old pirate is exactly the chance Hondo needs to return in The Bad Batch.

In the panel, Jim Cummings answered questions about how he came into the role of Hondo for Clone Wars:

"“What they’ll do is they’ll send out a call sheet. My agent said, ‘Well, you could read for this, you could read for that.’ I forget, I read for somebody else, ‘(puts on voice) some lesser character.’ And so, it was just a lot of fun. And I saw Hondo, and he just had a certain something about him that… he looked really cool… And they said that they wanted him to have an accent… See, everybody in the Star Wars universe up to that point, with the exception of Jar Jar Binks, and nobody knows what that accent is… It’s slightly Jamaican. So [I went] ‘Okay, well, I’m gonna do an accent where nobody knows where the hell this guy’s from…’ And just off the top of your head, does anybody where Hondo is from? Like if he was French, or Russian, or Irish, or… any guesses as to who that is?… Hondo is two accents put together, two character voices put together. And I always ask [audiences who the two voices are], but no one ever, ever, ever gets it right. And it’s two bodacious character actors in their own right. And it was Charles Bronson and Yul Brynner… So I put them together and out came Hondo Ohnaka.”"

Cummings also praised Dave Filoni during his work with the director:

"“…Yeah, he’s a great, great guy and he’s a fantastic director too, and by that I mean he kept all my ad-libs. No, but he was great. It was just a lot of fun. And you know, he lets it be organic. He lets us go for pages at a time… And he’d let us go for four or five pages at a time, so you really got the flow… and I think it shows in the performances.”"

It’s clear that Cummings loves to play Hondo. He voiced the animatronic at Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy Edge as well as the audiobook for the young reader novel Pirate’s Price by Lou Anders. If you want to hear what it’s like to have Hondo tell you first-person stories from his point of view, I highly recommend that audiobook. It’s a blast.

Dragon Con is always a great convention to hear these behind-the-scenes stories from the actors part of a galaxy far, far away. Jim Cumming’s excitement and wanting to continue to play Hondo is wonderful. Hopefully, that bodes well for the old Weequay pirate in future projects to come.

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