Amanda Rose Muñoz on her rise from production assistant at Lucasfilm Animation to one of the studio’s most trusted and important writers
By Danny Munso
In April 2023, when Lucasfilm chief creative officer Dave Filoni announced another season of shorts had been ordered after the success of 2022’s animated anthology Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi, he commented that part of the reason he wanted to add another installment to Tales was to—like the Jedi themselves—pass on the knowledge he had gained from working under George Lucas for years to the next generation of Lucasfilm storytellers. One of those is Amanda Rose Muñoz, a name that will be instantly recognizable to die-hard Star Wars fans. Not only has Muñoz been a key behind-the-scenes component of Lucasfilm Animation for close to a decade, she was also a core writer for all three seasons of The Bad Batch, which just ended its run this month. It’s why Filoni tapped her to pen a three-episode arc of the Jedi follow-up, Tales of the Empire, which just premiered on Disney+.
Muñoz’s career path should serve as an inspiration to others looking to forge a career as a writer. She began at Lucasfilm Animation as a production assistant on season two of Star Wars Rebels, which aired in 2016, and by season three she was script coordinator, which meant sitting in the writers’ room alongside not just Filoni but Henry Gilroy, Matt Michnovetz, Steven Melching and Brent Friedman, who had all worked and learned under Lucas over the original six-season run of The Clone Wars. Muñoz graduated from Cal State Northridge’s film school—with a minor in creative writing—and wanted to pursue that career path, but like a lot of young writers, she worried it would be too daunting. Sitting in the Rebels writers’ room day after day changed that. “Writing had always been on the horizon, but it seemed completely unachievable,” she says. “When I got into the writers’ room, it reawakened that passion: Oh, right, I remember I want to do this. But I didn’t say anything for a really long time. It was a couple more years before I got up the gumption.”
When Rebels wrapped its fourth and final season, Muñoz continued as script supervisor for the next set of animated Star Wars series: 2018’s Star Wars: Resistance and 2020’s final season of The Clone Wars. While The Bad Batch was in development, she let her career goal be known, and before she knew it, she received a meeting notification from Carrie Beck, currently EVP of live-action development and production but in charge of animation at that point in time. “Carrie said, ‘I heard you might be interested in writing, and we should talk about that,’ ” Muñoz recalls. “That set the course for me getting a sample to the team and them reading it. It was just before we started on Bad Batch. Things sort of took off from there.” But it’s one thing to hand over your writing to a stranger—it’s another to do so to longtime coworkers and friends. “The first time I turned in a script, there definitely was that anxiety of, If I screw this up, this is with people I know. It’s going to be so awkward, and I’m going to have to quit my job. But those were all just the anxious manifestations of my own mind.”
Muñoz earned the opportunity to write for season one of The Bad Batch, and she took advantage of it. Her two episodes were such a success she was brought on to the writing staff full-time for seasons two and three under head writer/executive producer Jennifer Corbett. “I met her on Resistance and knew she wanted to be a writer,” Corbett told Backstory. “She is a fountain of knowledge for Star Wars animation, and it was a seamless transition for her since she had been behind the scenes for so long and knew how the whole process worked.” Muñoz’s time on The Bad Batchincluded several of the standout episodes in that show’s entire run, most notably season two’s “The Solitary Clone” and “The Return” in season three, which both featured significant character moments that she’d penned brilliantly. When the writing for season three wrapped up, Filoni came calling.
Like its predecessor, Tales of the Empire is a series of six shorts tackling three distinct time periods in the lives of two characters. One trio of episodes follows disgraced and jailed Jedi Barriss Offee (voiced by Meredith Salenger), picking up a narrative thread from the season-five finale of Clone Wars in 2013. Filoni wanted Muñoz to work with him on the series’ first three episodes, which would flesh out the backstory of Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto), an Imperial magistrate audiences first met in season two of The Mandalorian before getting a much larger spotlight in 2023’s Ahsoka series. Filoni wrote Morgan’s debut episode in Mando as well as all eight episodes of Ahsoka, so it’s a character he has been thinking about and writing for a long time. To begin, Muñoz and Filoni conferenced to dissect the character and her history. “We talked about her and where she started and where we wanted to see her go,” the writer says. “We picked out these little moments of her life between the attack on Dathomir and the beginning of the events when we meet her in Mandalorian. I was super stoked to work close with Dave on that, and it was thrilling to work with him in that capacity.” The three episodes they settled on fleshed out major moments in Morgan’s life: where she was during the attack on her home planet Dathomir during the Clone Wars, how she came to align herself with her close ally Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen, reprising his role from Rebels and Ahsoka) and the events that occurred on the planet Corvus just before her episode of The Mandalorian.
The first thing viewers will notice about the three Morgan episodes are their titles: “The Path of Fear,” “The Path of Anger” and “The Path of Hate,” collective references to one of the most famous lines in Star Wars lore, as Yoda says to a young Anakin Skywalker, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” The episodes mark a clear through-line for how the destruction of Dathomir and Morgan’s people sends her down a road that leads to corruption and darkness. It’s why during writing those titles began to feel like obvious choices. “I don’t think we voiced it specifically in that way initially, but the concept was always there from the beginning,” Muñoz says. “It naturally comes with this kind of story about this kind of character. It’s such a classic Star Wars storyline for a reason. It happens differently in each individual, so getting to explore how that came about for Morgan felt really natural as we were talking about the pieces of storyline we were going to tell in Tales of the Empire.”
Photo of Amanda by the great Joel Aron
When we first meet Morgan—played in both live action and in Tales by Inosanto—in The Mandalorian, she is on Corvus presiding with an iron fist over the town of Calodan. The walled city is surrounded by acres and acres of forest that has been burned to the ground, filling the air with menacing smoke. Muñoz and Filoni discussed using that fact as a way to bring the motif of fire to the forefront. And there are multiple shots of Morgan with a wall of fire as a backdrop, both on Dathomir and on Corvus. “Early on, that was an image we had,” Muñoz says. “The forest on Corvus is completely burned out when we come to that moment in the story, so we knew that was something we needed to build on if we were going to lead into when we first meet her. As fire does, the idea got bigger and bigger as we were doing the episodes. I think it worked quite well for the character because she’s constantly letting her internal fire be fed.” In the third episode, Morgan gets a visit from the New Republic, who want her to stand trial for the way she abused her power during the Empire’s reign and for her treatment of the people of Corvus. In response, she has her guards kill the New Republic envoy and orders them to set fire to Corvus’ forests. Before she does so, she spits, “My world has been burning since I was a child. Why should this one be any different?” It’s a spine-tingling line, made even better by Inosanto’s icy delivery. “I don’t know how many times I’ve watched that episode, but it gives me chills every time,” Muñoz says. “It’s such a perfect culmination of why—of her why from that very first scene in that very first episode and everything that follows. That’s what’s driving her through everything she does. It is everything she built her world around at this point.”
The middle episode covering Morgan’s life is perhaps the most significant to her place in the grander Star Warsstory, as it’s when she first meets Thrawn, an important villain in both franchise history and some of the upcoming stories that will be told in both film and television. He can be a difficult character to write, because of his unique speaking style as well as the fact that he is usually the smartest character in the room. But it was easier for Muñoz than most, as she was in the writers’ room when Thrawn—the villain in Timothy Zahn’s popular Heir to the Empire trilogy of novels published in the early ’90s—was officially brought into the Star Wars canon for Rebels, where he remained the primary antagonist for seasons three and four of that show.
She was also present when Filoni brought Zahn himself into the Rebels writers’ room to discuss the character with the staff. “It is intimidating to write for him, but it’s surprisingly easy to do because I can just hear Lars’ delivery of him in my head,” Muñoz says. “This character has been around me for such a long time that I wanted to do it right and he’s been in my brain for so long. Having this amazing, ridiculously talented actor’s voice in my head as I’m putting it onto the page—it made it shockingly come out much more smoothly than I would have expected.” As Thrawn recruits Morgan to join the Empire, the character also makes mention that he can already see the cracks in the Empire’s foundation and there will come a day when it may crumble. This, of course, happens in Lucas’ original trilogy of films, but it’s fitting that Thrawn is one of the few who can see it coming years before it actually happens. “He is that guy. He’s not even three steps ahead. He’s in the other building before it’s already built, so I don’t think it was even a question that he would have [seen it coming]. He’s this character that’s seeing what’s right in front of him and also the next year and the next century. Honestly, that’s probably the hardest thing about writing for him. He’s so much smarter than I am. He always knows.”
With The Bad Batch just ending, Lucasfilm hasn’t yet officially announced its next animated series. Whatever it is, it’s a safe bet Muñoz will be a part of it. Her writing talents have clearly become invaluable to the studio and represents a return on investment for the writers and producers at the studio that mentored her along the way. “Every single person I work with has been nothing but supportive,” she says of Lucasfilm and its cadre. “I feel very, very lucky that I am surrounded by a group of people who really want to see me succeed and who have encouraged this growth for such a long time.”
This article is a part of Backstory‘s extensive Star Wars coverage which includes interviews with Jennifer Corbett and Brad Rau on the series finale of The Bad Batch, Deborah Chow on directing Obi-Wan Kenobi, interviews with all nine directors of Visions volume 2 plus coverage of The Mandalorian, The Last Jedi, Rebels, Resistance, The High Republic comics
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