While Ahsoka got her start as an animated character voiced by Ashley Eckstein, when the character was introduced in The Mandalorian, it also marked the arrival of actress Roserio Dawson into the Star Wars universe. Here are five little known facts about the person who brought Ahsoka to life in live action.
She’s a self identified Trekkie
While Roserio Dawson is currently playing one of the most well loved Star Wars Characters, Star Trek may actually be her original sci-fi love. In an interview on Conan O’Brien many years ago, she told a story about watching Star Trek episodes with her brother and talked about how much she loved the show. She then went on to cement her fandom of Star Trek by spouting off a few words in Klingon.
She has worked on a Jon Favreau project before
Jon Favreau is the creator of The Mandalorian, the show where Rosario Dawson first appeared as Ahsoka. However, this isn’t the first time that Dawson worked on one of Favrau’s projects. In 2002, Favreau wrote the screenplay for the movie The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest, based on the novel by the same name. Dawson starred in the movie as Alisa, making it the first time that the two ever worked on the same project. If you’ve never heard of the movie before, don’t worry. According to Box Office Mojo, the movie was released on June 28th, 2002, and came in 93rd place at the box office that weekend. The movie was only released in two theaters, and would end up grossing less than $6000 in total.
She has played four different characters in the DC universe
Rosario Dawson is one of the actors lucky enough to have worked in both the Marvel and DC universe. And, while her work on Marvel may be better known to some fans, playing Claire in Daredevil and the other Defenders shows, she’s actually played far more DC characters than Marvel ones. For several years now, Dawson has been the primary voice of Wonder Woman in most of the DC animated projects. Dawson has voiced the character in seven different DC Animated Original Movies as well as when the character appeared in Space Jam: A New Legacy. However, in one of the earliest DC Animated Original Movies that was titled simply Wonder Woman, she didn’t voice Wonder Woman but instead voiced the Amazon Artemis. In addition to Wonder Woman and Artemis, Dawson also provided the voice of Barbra Gordon/Batgirl in The Lego Batman Movie as well as the video game based on the movie. For her forth DC performance, she would voice the role of Catwoman in Batman: The Audio Adventures, a radio drama podcast that paid homage to the Batman TV show from the 1960s.
She was on Sesame Street as a kid
While plenty of celebrities will make guest appearances on Sesame Street to get a chance to interact with some of their favorite characters, Dawson was actually on Sesame Street long before she was ever famous. At the age of 12, Dawson appeared briefly in a segment about a group of kids who were growing a garden in the middle of the city. The segment first aired in November of 1991, and, according to Dawson, she was paid twenty dollars for her work on Sesame Street.
She got the role of Ahsoka thanks to Twitter
The earliest mention of Rosario Dawson playing the popular character didn’t come from Lucasfilm or anybody who was working on Star Wars. In February of 2017, a fan tweeted at Dawson, asking if she would ever be interested in playing the character. Dawson quickly responded “Ummmm… yes please?! #AhsokaLives #AhsokaTano #StarWars” causing several fans to begin to excitedly speculate about the possibility. According to Dawson in an interview that was published on StarWars.com, Dave Filoni saw the twitter exchange and thought that the casting would work. She said that her first sign that something might actually be happening was when the official Star Wars account followed her on twitter. Of course it would be a long time before she actually got a chance to play Ahsoka. The episode of The Mandalorian where she first appeared would not be released until November 2020, over three years after the initial twitter exchange, but the wait was well worth it. Ironically, the original tweet first asking Dawson about playing Ahsoka seems to have been deleted, meaning this important moment in Star Wars history is now missing.