The Bad Batch producers tease return of Asajj Ventress: ‘She’s fantastic’

The third and final season of The Bad Batch promises plenty of surprises — but perhaps the biggest news is the return of everyone’s favorite badass, bald Sith apprentice.

When Disney+ shared the first trailer for season 3, Star Wars fans were surprised to see Asajj Ventress, the former Sith trainee who made her debut in the Clone Wars. Voiced by Nika Futterman, Asajj quickly became a fan favorite, evolving from ferocious antagonist to morally gray bounty hunter. The character apparently met her end in the 2015 novel Star Wars: Dark Disciple — which is why her appearance in the Bad Batch trailer came as such a surprise.

Speaking to EW’s Dagobah Dispatch podcast, Bad Batch head writer Jennifer Corbett and supervising director Brad Rau opened up about bringing Ventress back for season 3. (They’re keeping the exact nature of her return under wraps, but they have teased that it will “align” with the events of Dark Disciple.)

“We’re just such big fans of that character that when the opportunity came up, we were like, ‘We can do this? Great,’” Corbett explains. “She’s fantastic. Any time we can have someone with such a unique perspective on the galaxy versus our group of guys and Omega, who have a very different experience, it’s just gold. We really wanted to mine that.”

“Nika Futterman, who voices Ventress, she’s so cool,” Rau adds. “She has the awesomest hats. In the booth, she knows this character so well. So, we would ask her questions, and she would ask us questions. We would kind of go back and forth. It’s really wild: The way that we record the show, we rely on the collaboration of our cast in a big way, especially a legacy character like that.”

Rau and Corbett add that they often turn to their voice actors for insight, especially when so many of them have played these characters for years, if not decades. (Dee Bradley Baker, for example, has been with the franchise since 2008 and has voiced countless clones.) Season 3 also sees the return of longtime Star Wars actor Ian McDiarmid, who reprises his role as the sinister Emperor. With a laugh, Rau remembers the iconic Sith lord giving them some unexpected lessons in the recording booth.

“I can’t remember the exact line, but there was a line that Ian McDiarmid was reading, and he changed the syntax slightly,” Rau explains. “It sounded amazing, but [we were] like, ‘Pardon me, sir, but can you read it the way it was written?’ And he corrected it. We had a Sith lord correct our grammar! So we were like, ‘Yeah, okay, we’re doing it your way.’”

The Bad Batch season 3 is airing now on Disney+.

To listen to our entire interview with Corbett and Rau — as well as other Star Wars luminaries like Ewan McGregor, Hayden Christensen, Rosario Dawson, Billy Dee Williams, and more — check out the Dagobah Dispatch podcast.

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