Here’s a rather surprising drop, but it looks like Darth Maul was originally going to appear in the upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series. The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that Ray Park was actively preparing to play the role. Yet, it seems that as part of an overhaul of the project, he was written out only for Darth Vader and other antagonists, very likely the many Inquisitors we’ve seen in the first trailer, to get added. It seems that he had a role in Hossein Amini’s original scripts before Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau supervised the scripts and feared some overlap with The Mandalorian.
The role given to Maul was him chasing down Kenobi trying to hide a very young Luke Skywalker. It seems they wanted showrunner Deborah Chow to “go bigger” with the project before Kathleen Kennedy got involved to ensure they’d rework it. They even found a young Skywalker actor who didn’t end up getting to film any scenes. Supposedly, some footage has been filmed with Park as test footage, but he was definitely set to return before getting written out. It seems that it was Filoni‘s idea to focus strongly on the Rebels’ Grand Inquisitor and Vader as part of the series.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
