Mena Massoud, who played the titular outcast in Disney's Aladdin, has apparently been cast as Ezra Bridger in the Ahsoka spinoff show.
Coincidentally, Ezra is a street urchin and con artist like Aladdin, though their journeys are like chalk and cheese. In Star Wars Rebels, Kanan Jarrus took him under his wing when he discovered that the young boy was Force-sensitive, aiming to train him in the light side and keep him from danger. As Ezra developed into a fierce combatant and a sympathetic member of the Resistance, he honed his skills that he learned as an orphan into tools for his daring deeds. With a powerful connection to the Force, he used his abilities and his own ingenuity to gain the upper hand in battles that he otherwise should have lost. However, he never lost sight of the fact that it was the whole of the Resistance who allowed these successes to come to pass, not his actions alone.
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The last time Ezra was featured in Rebels was in the episode "Into the Unknown." His powerful Force abilities brought a pod of purrgil to Grand Admiral Thrawn's fleet, destroying the majority of the ships and turning the tide for the Resistance. However, the purrgill (space whales who are able to jump from star system to star system with their natural ability to fly through hyperspace) were readying to leave the planet, and the ship that Ezra and Thrawn were on was embroiled in their tentacles. This was all part of Ezra's plan to remove Thrawn from the planet, but it meant that the two characters disappeared with the creatures, and no one knew whether they survived the jump to hyperspace.
In the second series of The Mandalorian, Ahsoka demands that Morgan Elsbeth reveal the location of Thrawn. This is part of her quest to find Ezra and bring him home, and along with the claim that Lars Mikkelsen is going to play the blue baddie in the spinoff, then it looks like Ezra's appearance in Ahsoka is only the beginning. It's possible that all three characters will have storylines that occur concurrently, switching between Ezra and Thrawn as they attempt to evade the other, while Ahsoka searches for clues.
This would be an amazing opportunity for Massoud, who has found it difficult to break out of the box that casting directors put him in after Aladdin. "It's like, I'm sitting here being like, OK, Aladdin just hit $1 billion. Can I at least get an audition? I'm not expecting you to be like, here's Batman! But can I just get in the room?" explained the actor in an interview with The Daily Beast. "I feel like I'm going to be overlooked and underestimated for a long time because I am a young actor. I've been doing this for 10 years, but to a lot of people, Aladdin's the first thing they've seen me in. So I think I'm going to be viewed that way for a long time. I'm going to have to work at chipping away at that."
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Fingers crossed. Other candidates for the role of Ezra Bridger include Taylor Gray (who plays the character in Rebels), Deniz Akdeniz, Angel Bismark Curiel, Ryan Potter, and Aramis Knight. We'll keep you in the loop when we know more about Ahsoka.
Featured Image Credit: Lucasfilm Animation, DisneyTopics: News