The following story contains spoilers for The Mandalorian Season 3, Episode 7, “The Spies.”
WHERE THE first two seasons of The Mandalorian spent a whole lot of time connecting to the original Star Wars films—featuring characters like Boba Fett and Luke Skywalker—Season 3 has shifted gears. Instead of looking back to the original trilogy (The Mandalorian takes place only a few years after Return of the Jedi), this season has looked forward, and done it in a way that clearly aims to fill in many of the remaining mystery gaps about how things get to where they are in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which kicked off the Disney-produced sequel trilogy of films.
And writers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni have taken a rather fearless approach. Rather than playing into the most universally well-received parts of the trilogy, they’ve taken it all on, with a primary storyline (involving Giancarlo Esposito’s Moff Gideon and Katy M. O’Brian’s Elia Kane) aiming to unravel the “somehow” in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker‘s infamous “Somehow Palpatine Returned” line. The answer is cloning, but the how and the way are still very much in the works.
Season 3, Episode 7, titled “The Spies,” continued to play into those sequel films. The episode eventually included thePraetorian Guards who figured chiefly into an unforgettable fight scene in Rian Johnson‘s brilliant (but polarizing) film Star Wars: The Last Jedi. But we only knew those guards were coming after we saw Gideon in a meeting with a Shadow Council that included someone with another familiar name from the sequel films: Hux.
Who is Commandant Brendol Hux in The Mandalorian?
It may take a second to realize who, exactly, Commandant Brendol Hux is in “The Spies,” after he’s introduced during his Shadow Council meeting with Moff Gideon. We hear the name “Hux,” and immediately think that it must be General Hux—the Nazi Leader-esque villain played by Domhnall Gleeson in all three Star Wars sequel films.
But based on the timeline, this is a different Hux; we’re still somewhere between 20 and 30 years ahead of The Force Awakens, so General Hux is most likely just pre-teen Hux, burning space worms with a magnifying glass somewhere.
Commandant Brendol Hux, as it turns out, though, is an extremely prominent Star Wars character—but this is his first appearance in live-action. Hux the elder, it turns out, is a real sociopathic sicko. He started as a military cog working for the Republic, but didn’t leave when it became the Empire. He was not satisfied with the Stormtrooper class that we saw in the original trilogy, and eventually came up with the idea of… well, no other way to put this: kidnapping children and training them, essentially from birth, to be Stormtroopers.
He eventually, off the books, created his own class: the Commandant’s Cadets. In order to join this group, interested parties had to kill a fellow cadet while making their deaths appear to be an accident. And many did this.
This elder Hux’s character is explored in several canon Star Wars novels, including Aftermath: Life Debt, Aftermath: Empire’s End, and Phasma, the novel focusing on Gwendoline Christie’s character from the sequel films.
Brendol Hux had a bastard son named Armitage Hux—the General Hux we know from the Star Wars sequel films.
The Commandant Brendol Hux that we meet in The Mandalorian is actually the father of General Armitage Hux, the villain featured in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
But, as revealed in the book Aftermath: Life Debt, Armitage is actually Brendol’s illegitimate son, born out of wedlock after an affair Brendol had with a “kitchen woman” while married. Brendol would verbally, physically, and psychologically abuse his son, calling him “weak-willed,” but nonetheless believing he had “potential,” whatever that means when you’re a Space Nazi.
In the sequel trilogy, we saw General Hux’s potential: a chilling villain who can be both scary and pathetic at different times.
Brian Gleeson—whose brother, Domhnall Gleeson, played General Hux—plays Brendol Hux.
If you thought that could’ve maybe been General Hux himself (just with a different outfit and a beard) during The Mandalorian‘s Shadow Council scene, we can’t blame you. That’s because Brendol Hux was played by actor Brian Gleeson, who’s the brother of actor Domhnall Gleeson, who played General Hux. Obviously, coming from the same acting family (their father is Brendan Gleeson, who was nominated for an Oscar this year for his role in The Banshees of Inisherin), it makes sense that they look and sound alike.
Brian Gleeson isn’t quite as well-known as his brother or father, but he’s a respected actor with an impressive resume nonetheless. He’s appeared in hit shows like Peaky Blinders and Apple TV+’s Bad Sisters, and shared the screen with Domhnall (and their father, in one episode) on Prime Video’s Frank of Ireland.
He’s also clearly someone that auteur directors like working with: he’s had roles, just to name a few, in Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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