Rosario Dawson: From dreaming of being a female action hero to ‘Ahsoka’

Rosario Dawson has been logging memorable movie and TV roles for decades, but she tells Emmy magazine that thanks to a Star Wars character named Ahsoka Tano — and the will of the Force — she’s made her dreams of being an action star come true.

Tano was first created by Dave Filoni for the Emmy-winning animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, voiced throughout the celebrated show’s entire run by Ashley Eckstein.

However, at some point, the Force, or the internet, took over: In a now-legendary deleted tweet, one fan posted a picture of Dawson embracing her onetime acting classmate Hayden Christensen — the guy who played Ahsoka’s teacher, Anakin Skywalker, in the Star Wars prequels.

Then artist Kode Abdo, who goes by BossLogic, tweeted a viral image of Dawson with Tano’s alien features.

Dawson responded, “Ummmm … yes please.”

Not long after that, Rosario got the job playing the formidable former Jedi in The Mandalorian and then The Book of Boba Fett, both of which Filoni produces and both leading to her own Ahsoka series.

“The Force is really strong on those projects,” Dawson says in the magazine’s cover piece. “Who knows what would’ve happened if BossLogic hadn’t made a fan-cast of me?”

Still, she comments, “Dave loves to be like, ‘You didn’t just get this job because of a tweet.'”

She says of the part, “Dream role? More like fantasy. There’s no way that I was trying to manifest this to happen. It’s unbelievable.”

Dawson adds, “I grew up loving action-hero women, with that Terminator kinda thing [in Linda Hamilton‘s Sarah Connor] and [Sigourney Weaver‘s Alien series character] Ripley. I can’t believe I’m playing someone in that sphere.”

Ahsoka debuts on Disney+ August 23.

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