Vinny Thomas Almost Hilariously Messed Up One Bit of His Ahsoka Appearance

One of the most surprising moments early on in Ahsoka wasn’t Star Wars nerd-bait like the canonization of the E-Wing or even the surprise appearance of Clancy Brown reprising his Star Wars Rebels role—but instead a familiar viral face showing up in the form of comedian Vinny Thomas. For Thomas, the moment was a dream come true… for the most part, outside of one flub in the spur of the moment.

Reflecting on his appearance in the Star Wars series with Polygon, Thomas—who played an older version of Jai Kell, a minor character from Star Wars Rebels who formerly trained at Lothal’s Imperial Youth academy—revealed that director Dave Filoni asked him to have a little fun with his lines. “At one point, Dave’s like, ‘Hey, how about you improvise a little line here?’ He was like, ‘You improvise, right?’ And I was like, ‘Deadass. Of course I improvise. Don’t ever ask me that. Of course I improvise,’” Thomas added, before revealing that his jitters over being on a Star Wars set led to him coming up with pretty much the one line he couldn’t use.

“I was so nervous, and the line I improvised was: ‘How on Earth?’,” Thomas revealed. “And I didn’t even realize it at first, but ‘How on Earth?’ came out of my mouth, and a second afterwards my eyes went huge and I stopped and Dave was like, ‘Can we cut for a second?’ He comes up and he is like, ‘Maybe don’t say Earth. You know, galaxy far, far away.’ And Clancy [Brown]’s cracking up. He’s, like, beside himself. I’m humiliated because I’ve never done anything like this. It’s like 40-foot-tall blue screens. You have to wear cloaks when you walk out of your trailer because nerds are flying drones over the set to try to see who’s there.”

Of course, this would’ve been far from the first time a real-world idiom would’ve made it into Star Wars—everyone still argues every once in a while about Han threatening to see the Rebel officer who tells him his tauntaun will freeze in Empire Strikes Back in hell—but of all the ones for Thomas to come up with on the spot, “How on Earth” is a pretty hilarious one to realize you can’t use here. Presumably compared to our mono-planet culture, the denizens of the galaxy far, far away don’t have a centralized location they can use to express disbelief—”How on Coruscant>” would probably mean very little to someone who’s spent their entire life on an Outer Rim planet like Lothal. Does everyone just use their homeworld? Do they pick the most prominent planetoid in a system? Does it even mean anything any more if the galaxy has a zillion different regional interpretations of one similar idiom?

We’ll be left to ponder, while Thomas will presumably be left to think about being momentarily mortified (in a funny way, at least) about his time in the galaxy far, far away.

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