CIt’s time to re-enter the fantastical world of Willow. The late 80s George Lucas/Ron Howard fantasy film is reborn as a series, launching today on Disney+. It stars Ruby Cruz and Dempsey Bryk, who play the children of Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley’s characters from the film.
So, what’s it about? Cruz tells ABC Audio the series is about a quest that begins when her brother is kidnapped.
“I lead a quest to go find him,” she explains. “We are definite ragtag team of misfits who have no idea what’s coming because we’re sort of embarking into the unknown… And I have all the false confidence in the world that I can find it and I’m faced with harsh realities.”
While Cruz didn’t know much about the movie before getting the role, she’s now “seen it a million times.”
“It’s so special and full of heart and just such a unique sort of, they take fantasy to a whole different, I don’t know, like it’s very contemporary as well as very fantastical,” she says.
Jon Kasdan, son of Star Wars scribe Lawrence Kasdan, created the show and shares that one of his main goals was to keep the things that made the movie great, which he attributes to a “combination of real humor and looseness with things that were genuinely scary and threatening.”
Pair that legacy with the fact that Willow came from the mind of George Lucas and he’s not worried about being overshadowed by other fantasy series.
“The truth is that George’s world is so unique, so specific to George and what he’s created, that it’s almost a genre unto itself. And I really feel like we’re working in the Lucasverse more than we’re working in any kind of fantasy universe that’s been seen before,” he says.
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