Star Wars has always had a knack for attracting the talents of truly great actors. Sir Alec Guinness bestowed the original Star Wars trilogy with enough of his graceful gravitas to sell George Lucas’s homespun mythology to the world while James Earl Jones similarly transformed Darth Vader into a villain with pathos with just his voice. In recent years, Disney has tapped Juilliard grads, British stage talent, and up-and-coming movie stars to populate its ever-expanding universe. Ironically, none of these recent turns seems to have affected me as much as Jude Law playing a shifty, Force-sensitive space pirate in the coming-of-age children’s yarn, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.
**Spoilers for Episodes 1-7 of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, now streaming on Disney+**
As Jod Na Nawood (or Captain Silvo or Crimson Jack or Dash Zentin or Jodwick Zank or whatever you want to call him), Law is charismatic, hilarious, terrifying, and downright intoxicating. Beyond that, Law is proving, once more, that he’s one of the greatest actors working today…all while hoodwinking a bunch of space brats in a cutesy throwback adventure.
Star Wars: Skeleton Crew was created by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts as a quaint mashup of their favorite Amblin features of their youth and Disney’s Star Wars universe. The show was initially pitched to fans as a Goonies-esque adventure story about a quartet of precocious kids lost in space with only a mysterious Jedi named Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) to guide them home.
When the series finally debuted on Disney+ in December 2024, it soon became apparent that Skeleton Crew was attempting something darker in its storytelling. Not only were the kids â overachieving Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), over-imaginative Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), adorkable Neel (Robert Timothy Smith), and clever KB (Kyriana Kratter) â blissfully unaware that their suburban home planet was a secret Old Republic mint, but Jude Law’s Jedi was clearly a conman.
Even if you didn’t clock Law as the masked pirate Captain Silvo in the series’ cold open, his introduction to the children invites cynicism. He claims to be a Jedi and seemingly uses the Force to easily free them all within minutes. The kids themselves question his true identity and motives. Why is he imprisoned in a cell in the first place? Is he really even using the Force? And as they meet more people, who know Jod by yet more names, they wonder if he can even be trusted. Does any part of him even care for the children he consistently saves from peril? (By the end of Skeleton Crew Episode 7, the answer to that last question appears to be a resounding no. He’s just in it for the wealth of At Attin.)
Throughout his Skeleton Crew recaps, Decider contributor Sean T. Collins has praised Law’s “star power and talent, carefully honed over decades” in this series, but nowhere was I personally more floored by what the actor could do than I was in last week’s episode. After Jod brutally murders his rival pirate Brutus, he viciously bullies the kids who have led him to the treasure of At Attin. His warmth has cooled into ice cold cruelty, transforming the Errol Flynn-esque swashbuckler into a chilling villain. If that wasn’t impressive enough, Law transforms Jod all over again with the beleaguered criminal’s first glimpse of At Attin’s immense wealth.
After Jod and our young heroes are whisked into the deep subterranean vaults of At Attin, one of the planet’s droids reveals that the massive room of treasure we’re seeing is simply one of over a thousand of its kind. Jod’s cockiness melts away when he first gazes upon a single crate of Old Republic credits. There’s more than a vulnerability; there’s pain. You understand the magnitude that this pile of gilded tiles represents to Jod, a man who has spent a lifetime talking his way out of executions and hungering for both food and security. The money’s meaning becomes all the more twisted when you realize how little the kids of At Attin care about it. This is just lunch money for Wim and his buddies, proving Jod’s point that they really are coddled.
Then, comes the hysteria.
Within seconds, Jod’s face has shifted from solemn reverence to greedy, Scrooge McDuck-esque glee. He’s laughs as the golden credits cascade over him. It’s hilarious as it is eerie. And it’s the perfect prelude to Jod turning to ignite a blue lightsaber â the literal symbol of peace and justice in the Old Republic â to threaten the lives of the kids and their newly arrived parents.
If nothing else, Jod Na Nawood, or whatever his name is, is the epitome of erratic. And yet, it all hangs together as a single performance thanks to the genius of Jude Law.
Heading into tonight’s finale, there’s still a part of me that feels some sort of sympathy for this incredibly nuanced new Star Wars villain. Even as he waltzes closer to the Dark Side, there’s an omnipresent shadow of pain in Jude Law’s eyes, an empathetic understanding of what the unfortunate crave, that speaks to someone who has lost much during the Light and Dark Sides’ tug-of-war in the Star Wars galaxy.
That sort of humanity, that sort of nuance doesn’t necessarily exist in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew‘s writing. It comes to life in Jude Law’s monumental performance.
If Jude Law’s run on Skeleton Crew reminds me of any other actor’s turn in the Star Wars universe, it’s Sir Alec Guinness himself. Like the great actor who elevated Lucas’s original film by fully selling the idea of Jedi knights, Clone Wars, and the Force itself to audiences, Jude Law’s commitment to Skeleton Crew takes it from tepid young adult fare to must tune-in genre storytelling. I like those kiddos, but I’m loving the absolute verve Law displays week after week.
Jod Na Nawood might spell At Attin’s destruction, but Jude Law has single-handedly made Star Wars: Skeleton Crew a must-watch series.
The Star Wars: Skeleton Crew Season 1 finale premieres on Disney+ tonight, January 14, at 9 PM ET/6 PM PT.
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