'The Mandalorian' Casts 'Twilight Saga' And 'Westworld' Actress Julia Jones

The Mandalorian premieres in just over two months, but we're still finding out about new additions to its cast. The latest: Julia Jones, who you may remember from her role as Leah Clearwater in the Twilight films, has come on board showrunner Jon Favreau's Star Wars series in a mystery role.Deadline has the news, but couldn't provide any information about what type of character Jones is playing in the Disney+ streaming show. IMDb currently claims the actress will appear in all eight episodes of The Mandalorian's first season, but we'll have to wait and see if that's actually true. (IMDb can sometimes be wonky about credits before a project has debuted.)

Jones may be best known for the Twilight movies, but Westworld fans may remember her as Kohana from the terrific season 2 episode "Kiksuya," which focused on the backstory of the Native American members of Ghost Nation – she played the love interest for Zahn McClarnon's Akecheta. Jones has also appeared in movies like Wind River, The Ridiculous 6, and Cold Pursuit, as well as TV shows like ER, Longmire, and Goliath.

Favreau spoke about the show earlier this week at Variety's Entertainment and Technology summit:

"For Star Wars, the question was how do we make it feel like Star Wars, how can I tell a story set in this particular time...what's this gritty world? The original Star Wars movies were a bit more intimate, character driven. In many ways this follows the structure of a television show in that we don't have an endless budget and it's served by the scale of the original films which isn't the big, huge blockbuster movies you see on the big screen all the time. We are using technology that makes best use of that scale and part of what we're exploring is using game engine, real-time rendering."

Jones joins a cast that includes Pedro Pascal, Gina Carano, Nick Nolte, Carl Weathers, Taika Waititi, Giancarlo Esposito, Emily Swallow, Omid Abtahi, and Werner Herzog. You can learn more information about their characters here. The show's official synopsis (below) is vague, and even though it says it's set before the emergence of The First Order, a recent interview with Favreau and fellow executive producer Dave Filoni indicates that the show will touch on how that organization rose to power before The Force Awakens:

After the stories of Jango and Boba Fett, another warrior emerges in the Star Wars universe. The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.

The Mandalorian premieres on Disney+ when the new streaming service launches on November 12, 2019.