Who is Timothy Olyphant Playing in The Mandalorian Season Two?

The news broke last week that Timothy Olyphant would be joining season two The Mandalorian, Disney+’s wildly popular live-action Star Wars series. Then, /Film shared the scoop that Olyphant’s mysterious character will be wearing—wait for it—Boba Fett’s iconic armor. But hold on, it doesn’t appear that Olyphant is playing the legendary bounty hunter who first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, as that role seems to have already been filled. Confused yet?

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed that not only was the Deadwood and Justified star Olyphant joining the cast of The Mandalorian‘s second season but that Temuera Morrison, the actor who played Boba Fett’s father Jango Fett in George Lucas’s prequels, is also joining the cast, presumably to play his cloned son from those films in the series. That means Morrison is playing Boba, but then if Olyphant is wearing Boba’s armor…

This is where things become pure speculation, and where you should stop reading if you’re looking to go into the second season knowing nothing.

So, the theory of how Olyphant can don Boba Fett’s armor but not be Boba Fett is if he’s playing a totally different character from the Star Wars canon that had done just that—Cobb Vanth. Vanth first appeared in Chuck Wendig’s trilogy of novels, “Star Wars: Aftermath.” In those, this minor character is a lawman. Yet he’s a very particular lawman—he was once a slave, and after freeing himself, he managed to get his hands on some beaten up Beskar armor from some Jawas that the novel implies belonged to Boba Fett. You’ll recall that Fett was swallowed—presumably, to death—by the sarlacc in Return to the Jedi. Now, technically, we’ve never had Boba Fett’s death confirmed, but things that go into the sarlacc’s dusty, fanged, massive mouth don’t usually come back out again as anything other than bones.

So Vanth uses Boba Fett’s armor in the books and becomes the protector of a small settlement called Freetown on Tatooine. This sounds like a role that Olyphant could do in his sleep, considering how ably he embodied the morally stout but ready-to-rumble Sheriff Bullock in Deadwood. 

If Olyphant is Vanth and Morrison is Boba Fett in some capacity, then there’s an infinite number of potentially intriguing storylines that would force these two together. For example, if the notorious bounty hunter and law un-abider Fett somehow survived the sarlacc but without his armor, and then found some other dude using his armor to be a cop, well, we imagine he might have some issues with that.

Featured image: The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) in his ship the Falcon Crest. Courtesy Walt Disney Studios