Rosario Dawson on reuniting with “old friend” Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker in Ahsoka

The sixth of eight episodes of Ahsoka debuted on Disney+ on Tuesday, but Lucasfilm has just posted a deeper dive into episode 5, which saw the former Jedi facing off with her former master, Anakin Skywalker.

As reported, it was fans who first dreamed of one day seeing Rosario Dawson as a live-action Ahsoka Tano alongside Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels.

Most didn’t know, however, that the pair go way back.

“I first met Hayden when I was 16, and we were in an acting school over the summer,” Dawson, now 44, shares.

The fifth episode shows a defeated Ahsoka in what’s known in Star Wars parlance as the World Between Worlds, a vision quest-like portal accessible through the Force. It’s there that an adult Ahsoka reunites with the teacher she first met at 14 —before his fall to the Dark Side and rebirth as Darth Vader.

That’s where life imitated art, Dawson explains, saying, “…to have that kind of history with him, it really was like seeing my old friend.”

For his part, a “very, very grateful” Christensen says he was “thrilled” to be a part of the project that reunited the characters, whose relationship began in the animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

While fans only glimpsed a pre-fall Anakin in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series, Ahsoka showed Anakin training his former Padawan learner at different points in her life.

Dawson says that when they meet again as adults, “It just was really, really powerful…to see her guard come down. You know her as a stoic, super-powerful, on top of it warrior, and all of a sudden is a Padawan again.”

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