Jonny Coyne says as much as he’s allowed to about ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’ and reflects on the life of a character actor: “I’ve been killed off in two sitcoms!”
Obviously, the biggest issue in talking to an actor who stars in the first new Star Wars movie in seven years is that they aren’t at liberty to say a whole lot about the first new Star Wars movie in seven years.
On the plus side, Jonny Coyne is nothing if not apologetic about it, and we both knew what we were getting ourselves into. After all, Disney and Lucasfilm probably have snipers on the roof, ready to eliminate anyone who reveals too much about Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu ahead of time.
What we do know is that the film is the first big-screen trip to a galaxy far, far away since JJ Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, it follows directly on from the three-season Disney+ series that introduced Pedro Pascal’s title character to the world, and sent pop culture apeshit over his little green buddy.
Coyne, making his return to the franchise after his cameo appearance in the penultimate episode of The Mandalorian‘s third season, ‘The Spies’, reprises his role as an imperial warlord named Janu. That’s about as much as Far Out has to go on, and we sympathise with the actor to a certain extent, since we know that he’s likely signed all sorts of NDAs, which backs the conversation into a corner from the start.
“Tell me about it,” he acknowledged. “There’s very little I can say, to be honest with you, I don’t know why you called me! You get these big briefings about what you can and can’t say ahead of time, so you’re not accidentally giving away. There are strict things about what I can say and what I can’t say.”
That was to be expected, but the secrecy even applied to Coyne’s copy of the script, and he’s in The Mandalorian and Grogu. “When we received the script, I only got to read it once,” he revealed. “I had a script given to me at the studios. I said I wanted to see how the character fits into the whole story. And I was given an iPad, which I had to sign in and sign out, read it, and then give it back. And that was it.”
That was the one and only time he laid eyes on the screenplay in full, and for the rest of his time on set, he was “receiving things piecemeal,” with his access limited only to the scenes he was in. So far, so Star Wars, but since it wasn’t his first brush with George Lucas’ brainchild, Coyne did at least have some sense of familiarity with how these things worked.
He was only a hologram the first time around, though, but he’s a much more significant presence in the movie. “His motivation is always just to do evil,” he mused of Janu’s role in the plot. “He’s basically a remnant of the Empire, and there are remnants of them scattered around the galaxy, and we’re just up to no good, and it’ll be clear that I’m up to no good when you see it.”
Vague, yes, but it has been confirmed that Coyne features in a scene where he has Grogu held captive in a cage. What can he say about that, since we know it’s happening? Hee haw, apparently. “Sorry,” he prefaced. “Except, I’m working with Grogu, so I’m obviously going to be the most hated man in the universe now, having Grogu in a cage, but he was fun to work with.”
Finding a workaround, Far Out takes the circuitous route and asks the actor how he ended up being cast in The Mandalorian to begin his Star Wars association. “How I got the job, I have no idea,” he answered. “I just got a call one day from my agent, who said, ‘By the way, you’ve just been offered The Mandalorian.’ I said, ‘OK, that’s nice.'”
Fortunately, he’d “watched the show, and I really liked the show, and I knew Star Wars, and I thought it was amazing,” but he still hasn’t got a clue when and where Favreau decided he’d be the ideal guy to play a small part as a nefarious hologram: “Maybe he saw me in something, or saw my face in a photograph and thought, ‘That guy’s an evil guy: I’ll use him.'”
Regardless of how it happened, it was a whirlwind. “Next thing I know, I’m on the set of The Mandalorian!” Coyne marvelled. “I was filmed independently of all the others, because I’d been ill during the actual main shoot of that. So I came back about two months later to do my little bit as a hologram, and the next thing I know is that it’s become a movie!”
That said, in a franchise the size of Star Wars, there’s always a chance that any character can be brought back for future appearances, and he was always hopeful of getting that call. “There was talk of The Mandalorian having a fourth season,” he shared. “But I think they were going, whether it be a full season or a movie, ultimately, they wanted to tell the story that they wanted to tell, and they chose the movie platform to do it, because that’s the best way to tell this story, I think.”
Not many actors would say no when asked the question, ‘Do you want to be in a Star Wars movie?’, and Coyne had no interest in being in the minority. “It was ridiculous!” the character man exclaimed. “It was a childhood dream to do something like this. I was interviewed by John Favreau, thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be the final yay or nay as to whether I’ve got the job,’ but there was never any doubt, apparently.'”
As it turned out, Janu had always been a part of the script written by Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor, so he had nothing to worry about. Coyne mentioned that The Mandalorian and Grogu was a childhood dream come true, so it was worth asking if he was among the first wave of original Star Wars fans, since he was a teenager when the original changed the face of cinema in 1977.
He was, but he still wouldn’t accept the compliment. “Here’s the thing: you said ‘teenager’. I was a late teenager, 18/19 years old, so hardly a child, unfortunately,” he admonished. “You’re a very young man, and I don’t think you maybe don’t realise just how big a deal it was that this thing came out.”
After becoming one of the few people to anoint a 36-year-old as a “very young man,” which anyone of the same age would happily take, he continued. “There was nothing like it,” Coyne reflected. “There were science movies, science fiction movies, there were space movies, but there was nothing like this, really, the cowboys and Indians in space, goodie versus baddie, and done with fun because all the rest were a bit more po-faced.”
As he said, the script was shrouded in secrecy. However, surely the shroud would be lifted when he arrived on set? Nope. “I mean, I once or twice forgot and left the sides, the shooting script, in my bag and went home with them,” he ominously recalled. “And then I get a call from the stage manager: ‘We want them back.’ ‘I’ll bring them tomorrow, yes, sure.’ ‘Don’t forget.'”
It was an accident, but Coyne learned that “absolutely nothing escapes that building without some sort of investigation going on.” Being kept in the dark extended to his co-stars, too, with the actor only discovering that he was in the same movie as Martin Scorsese, who voices an alien, when browsing the internet. “That was a new one to me!” he admitted. “When I started seeing who was playing what, and that was amazing, to read that on IMDb. Yeah, I’m actually in a movie with Martin Scorsese!”
This being Star Wars, the franchise has fans who are known for being particularly knowledgeable and studious. Many of them also fancy themselves as amateur detectives, and since Coyne is aware that they know more about it than he does, he’s not too keen on being quizzed about the minutiae: “It’s terrifying! I’m going to be asked a question I don’t know!”
“I have read some of the theories, and some of them are amazing,” he pointed out. “And you think, ‘Well, that would be fantastic!’ But I can’t say which ones are true and which are not true. Let’s say that the fans really do have great storylines in their canons, as it were.” In his defence, Favreau is partly to blame.
The director hinted that the more knowledgeable Star Wars fans “will like his character’s name” when describing Coyne’s Janu, which sparked countless fan theories. Is he willing to shed a little light on what that name may or may not be? Of course he isn’t, he’s not allowed to, but he did at least drop a little hint.
“Well, you know that I can’t tell you any more about that,” he clarified, and we did know. “The name might amuse people, might titillate. I can’t reveal too much about that, because I mean, it’s more than my life’s worth, really!” If that doesn’t sum up the modern Star Wars experience for an actor, then what does?
He’s only half-kidding, but even being on the set was enough to unleash Coyne’s inner child, no matter how much he isn’t allowed to say about The Mandalorian and Grogu. “Extraordinary to be on those kinds of sets,” he said. “I’m on the kind of sets that you wanted to be on. I promise you, I’m on the kind of thing that you’d want to be part of, so without giving too much away, I’m on the correct set.”
The veteran has been busy across film and television for decades, but this was still a new experience, mostly because the pre-release hype is unlike anything he’s ever been through: “I’ve done lots of work, lots of movies, lots of TV shows, nobody really wants to know about anything else in the way that Star Wars fans want to know every tiny little detail of the film!”
Speaking of that “lots of work,” Coyne has amassed an eclectic array of credits on screens big and small. Having exhausted our Star Wars avenues, since the ‘Mouse House’ won’t let him explore most of them, Far Out opted to pivot. With The Mandalorian and Grogu out of the window, it was time to take a trip down memory lane.
To begin, we quiz Coyne on his feature-length debut in Mike Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning 1994 dramedy, Secrets & Lies, which also notched five Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. An impressive way to check off your first movie, not that it’s entirely etched in his memory.
“Yeah, I forgot about that!” he laughed. “Basically, Mike Leigh came and saw me at drama school. I was still a young lad. He came and saw me, and seemed to like me very much. And next thing I know, he’s invited me to come and do a day’s work on Secrets & Lies. You know how Mike Leigh works; he tends to improvise for months and months and months. I didn’t get all that!”
“He said, ‘Look, you and Mia Soteriou, who’s the girl involved, go off and create another couple, and come up with a story, and you guys are going to be photographed,'” Coyne elaborated. “We spent all day trying to work out our characters, then we came, and we shot it, and it was brilliant. It was a thrill to be working like that, it was great fun.”
Keeping him on his toes, we jumped forward almost 20 years to the JJ Abrams-created TV show, Alcatraz, which was the actor’s first major series regular role on American television. Unfortunately, it was cancelled after a single 13-episode season, but it’s something he still looks back on fondly.
“I loved doing Alcatraz,” he remembered. “I was playing the warden of Alcatraz, which was the highly sought-after part that season. It was the show to get, and I got to play Edwin. Had great fun with that, and it’s a shame didn’t last any longer than the first season.” Not that it was his first brush with a crime show, though, since every British actor of his generation was obligated to appear in The Bill.
Coyne was in five episodes of the long-running series between 1990 and 2008, playing four different characters: “I played a journalist twice, and I played… I can’t remember all of them, but one journalist was twice, and I played… I’m mixing up my TV shows. I fell through a roof in Casualty; I can’t remember what the other characters were! To be honest, I can’t remember their names!”
Coincidentally, he also played Spiros in 2023’s The Family Plan, directed by Simon Cellan Jones. The filmmaker got his start on The Bill, and Far Out asked him about that when we spoke to him, but their paths never crossed. “That was great fun to do,” he reminisced of the Mark Wahlberg caper. “I don’t know how I got that. I think either a little audition, and they seem to like what I did, and invited me in!”
20 years previously, Coyne appeared in his first big-budget studio picture when he shared scenes with Angelina Jolie as Gus Petraki in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life. His character gets killed offscreen, but as the actor opined, meeting his end away from the cameras is something he’s gotten used to over the years.
“Absolutely, as I tend to be,” he noted, with an onscreen offing much harder to come by. “I’ve been killed off in a lot of things. I’ve even been killed off in sitcoms, believe it or not. Nobody should be killed off in a sitcom, but I was killed off in a sitcom! I’ve been killed off in two sitcoms!”
How do you get killed off in a sitcom? Let Coyne explain. “Once to a motorcycle accident, and once going into a deep coma in Mom and dying from a deep coma, which I was in for a whole year,” he declared. “The actress who was playing my love interest in that said to me, she called me up, and said, ‘Jonny, today’s the day that your character finally dies.’ I said, ‘Well, listen, I’ve been expecting it. It’s been a year I’ve been in a coma, so clearly it’s going to happen at some point!'”
He’s ticked off some right British staples, too, with EastEnders, Silent Witness, and Miss Marple all on the resume alongside The Bill and Casualty. “It’s been a ride,” he surmised. “My British career, for sure, the American career is completely different. It’s completely different. It’s much more expansive because American production companies have more money to spend. They’ve very many more productions, and there’s more chance of doing a variety of things.”
One of those expansive American productions saw Coyne pop up as a Polish accountant in ‘No Knock, No Doorbell’, the 16th episode of Twin Peaks‘ final season. “I’ve got a photograph of me on Instagram, and it’s the one that’s liked the most, because it’s just me and David Lynch, and I didn’t even ask for it,” not that he was against having it taken.
“His assistant said to me, ‘Do you want a photograph with David?’ I went, ‘Yeah, of course.’ And so she pulled me aside, and David just stood there and had a photograph with me,” and it’s something he’ll never forget, and a memory enshrined. “It was just fantastic. You know, that is historic, he’s a legend.”
The second ‘Best Picture’ nominated movie of Coyne’s career, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was also the late Chadwick Boseman’s final film. The way the shooting schedule was structured, he has the distinction of sharing one of the Black Panther star’s last-ever scenes, where Levee Green shares the screen with Mel Sturdyvant.
“Nobody knew how ill Chadwick was, and I had the dubious honour of doing one of the last few performance scenes with him ever because he wanted to work in such a way, the film, from his point of view, was filmed chronologically, unlike most movies, and so my big scene with him was the second to last scene that he did,” he poignantly offered. “I was one of the last few actors that he worked with, which was very touching, really, when I heard about it.”
From a ‘Best Picture’ nominee to the batshit insane: 2009’s The Nutcracker in 3D tanked at the box office, became one of the worst-reviewed movies in recent history, and came under fire for using Tchaikovsky’s titular ballet as the backdrop to a misconceived parable on World War II and the Holocaust. Coyne played Gnomad, and he doesn’t really seem to remember too much about that one.
“Yes, a very strange character, starts off as a guy with a moustache,” he concurred. “It was filmed in Hungary. I can’t remember much about it, except that [Andrei] Konchalovsky was a legendary director/writer; he wrote Andrei Rublev with Tarkovsky, so the chance to work with him was amazing. But ask me anything about that film: I can’t remember a thing, and I was on it for 11 weeks!”
Ending our trip down memory lane, we bring up Allfather D’Aronique from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Preacher. The pompous, bulbous, and absolutely grotesque villain is a horrible bastard in every way, but one that must have been a blast to play. Funnily enough, it was.
“It was fantastic to get into that gear every single day,” Coyne agreed. “I mean, it was an hour and a half with all the makeup that they put on me, and to eat that kind of food that they kept serving me up with this revolting character that I played, that was a ride, that was such fun to do.”
As he mentioned earlier, he’s been killed off more than a few times. That includes being drilled through the head, offscreen, of course, in Gangster Squad, being gunned down in The Hangover Part III, getting annihilated by Kevin Bacon in The Toxic Avenger remake, and being blown up from the inside out in Preacher, but only one of them endures as the actor’s all-time favourite among his many deaths.
“I think Preacher wins hands down, doesn’t it?” he asked rhetorically. “I mean, come on! It was like the voice of God enters you, and you just blow up. That’s just fantastic, and it was a mess. It was all over this white, pristine white set, so there’s guts everywhere!”
