The upcoming Disney Plus streaming series Willow serves as a direct sequel to the 1988 film of the same name. The series introduces a slew of young, new characters and while the main focus of the plot is a quest that features the new group, the series is still very much connected to the film and includes the return of several characters from it. Warwick Davis, who was just 17 years old when he first played Willow Ufgood, and Joanne Whalley, both of whom shared the bulk of the screentime of the film with Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan, are back to reprise their roles. Despite Kilmer’s iconic hero not being able to return, one other memorable character does make a return for Willow: the roguish Brownie Rool, played by Kevin Pollack.
Rool was one of a pair of Brownies tasked by Cherlindrea with accompanying Willow to Tir Asleen to safely deliver Elora Danan. Rool shared quite a few scenes with Willow during the course of the film, but interestingly enough, as revealed during the global press junket for the upcoming series, the two actors had never met.
As Jon Kasdan explained, the effects necessary for the Brownie scenes in Willow required them to be shot in a different location, so it wasn’t until production on the series got underway that Davis and Pollak finally met for the first time.
There was a… there was an incredible thing that happened where we got our friend Kevin Pollak out to reprise his role as Rool. And he told me when he arrived that he and Warwick had never actually done any scenes together, because all of the brownie bits in the movie had been filmed on, at Skywalker in Northern California. And Warwick and he got to actually riff off each other, and Tony got to be a part of that, and it was quite an amazing thing to kind of watch them actually interact, these old friends who didn’t know each other.
Jon Kasdan
With so much time having passed since the events of the original, neither Willow nor Rool are quite in the same places they were the last time they were seen. Fans of the original will certainly get a kick out of the changes to Pollak’s character when Willow begins streaming on Disney Plus on November 30th.
