This week’s episode of The Mandalorian finally introduced former Rebel shock trooper Cara Dune played by Gina Carano. She joins forces, briefly, with Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian in order to defend a village of Sorgan krill farmers against a ravaging band of Klatooinian raiders. It’s a prime showcase for Carano and the first onscreen role to truly capitalize on the MMA fighter’s real-life, distinct blend of inherent sweetness and physical toughness. It’s also the kind of role that the well-muscled Carano never thought she’d get to play. She spoke with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast about why she was convinced that a woman like her would have to put on a Wookiee suit in order to join the action in a galaxy far, far away.
“I thought I was going to be like the female Chewbacca,” Carano says of getting the call to join The Mandalorian. “I was ready to put on the fur outfit and be the female version of that. That’s what I thought. I was surprised to find that I was one of the few people that you were actually going to see her face—and in a lot of scenes, sometimes the only face, which is pretty incredible.”Carano is, perhaps, hinting at the future of her character. Fans of Cara Dune will be pleased to know that despite the Mandalorian leaving her behind to peacefully sip spotchka on Sorgan this week, the character will return. In fact, Carano is currently busy filming season two of The Mandalorian.
According to Carano, Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau wrote the character of Cara Dune with her specifically in mind and didn’t audition anyone else for the role. That perfect match of character and performer comes through immediately in this first episode where Carano’s gentle persona is on display as much as her physical prowess. The last film to come close to capitalizing on the potential inherent in Carano was Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire which made the most out of her character knocking the stuffing out of some of Hollywood’s favorite leading men—Ewan McGregor,Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, etc.—but missed the mark personality-wise. Soderbergh opted to digitally deepen Carano’s voice and, in some case, re-dubbed her lines with an uncredited Laura San Giacomo.
In The Mandalorian, finally, we have pure Carano. “This diamond, this cool character,”Carano says of reading about Cara Dune for the first time. “I have so much in common with her.” The actor credits her ability to translate the words on the page to a fully-formed performance in the episode to her first director on the show, Bryce Dallas Howard, who insisted on as many takes as Carano needed to get things right. “She could tell, Okay, you didn’t feel good about that,” Carano recalls. “Let’s try it again.”
Howard who, as the daughter of actor-director Ron Howard, grew up in the industry has recently started speaking out both about how women are allowed to look in Hollywood and how they’re allowed to behave onscreen. Given the former, Howard was quick to weigh in on Carano’s costume.
The process started with a mold of Carano’s body—“not the funnest”—but when Howard started adding her two cents the whole concept became about conveying toughness without sacrificing femininity. “How do you put basically football padding on a busty curvy female?”Carano recalls. “ I didn’t want to be a block. I didn’t want to just be this like big, buff refrigerator.”
Carano worked closely with Howard to build out her shoulders and cinch in her waist in order to create Cara Dune’s striking silhouette. Executive producers Favreau and Dave Filoni occasionally weighed in as well adding accessories like Dune’s “very Han Solo blaster.” The finished product, Carano was relieved to see, both made Cara Dune look tough enough to “take down a buffalo” but still let the actor feel attractive: “They found the most incredible balance, hopefully little girls and, or boys can put it on for Halloween.”
As for Dune’s fighting spirit, Carano also credits Howard for helping shape the performance. In 2017, when speaking with Vanity Fair about an episode of Black Mirror titled “Nosedive” where her character goes from mild-mannered to righteously unhinged,Howard confessed that she felt “panicky” and “emotional” when having to portray angry women: “I don’t know if it’s cultural or if it’s a certain level of conditioning, or if it’s just my temperament, but when I am angry, it definitely triggers the deepest, most intense feeling.”
But Carano says that Howard reveled in seeing her go to those more aggressive places in The Mandalorian: “She was like, Whoa, Cara Dune has anger issues. She was really fascinated. She plays certain types of characters on film, and she looks at my character, and it’s the complete opposite of the character she gets to play. She’s like, ‘I get to live through you. I get to live through Cara, and I get to live and see what I would want to do.‘”
Howard certainly won’t be alone in enjoying seeing a female character like Cara Dune contain the multitudes of physical power and aggression tempered by Carano’s natural sweetness. Even Favreau told Carano: “You’re the character that I’ve always wanted to play—raising the stakes and raising hell.”For Carano it’s a dream come true even if, she confesses, she would have settled for much less in order to be part of The Mandalorian: “I would’ve worn that Chewbacca costume.” Luckily for us, she didn’t have to.
