Jon Favreau sat across from Tracy Smith on CBS Sunday Morning this Sunday, May 17, 2026. The director was there for one reason: The Mandalorian and Grogu lands in cinemas this week, the first Star Wars picture in nearly seven years. One idea kept coming back.
The film moves on the bond between the helmeted bounty hunter and the small green creature Grogu, a pairing Jon Favreau simply called “a family of choice”. On screen, he argued, what you actually see is a father-and-a son story dressed up in spaceships.
Back in 2019 The Mandalorian was released on Disney+; the new movie borrows that same toolkit pretty much whole. Pedro Pascal is once again wearing the helmet of the bounty hunter who anchors the story. So is Grogu, the puppet creature most viewers still call baby Yoda.
The puppet stays a puppet, which is the whole trick of the operation. He wants the film to feel, in his own phrase, “analog handmade”, so a new audience walking in cold can still feel something real on screen.
Tracy Smith questioned him on the heart and core of the story. Jon Favreau went straight to family. The father and son thread, he said, has run through every chapter of Star Wars since the original.
The one in this movie may be one of the most positive in the entire saga. The catch is that the two characters are not related at all, and to him that is precisely the point.
How Jon Favreau built the look and feel of Grogu?
The director circled back to Grogu more than once. Six years after he first arrived on screen, the small creature is still a fan favorite. The costumes, the puppets and the practical design all share what he keeps calling an analog handmade feel.
The cute creatures in Star Wars, he pointed out, always look a little off, never sanitized. Grogu fits that tradition with sharp little teeth, claws and patches of wiry hair.
The team did not see the scale of the reaction coming. They knew the creature would be a hit, but they did not know that the intensity would be this much. A balloon in the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, within months of the show going live was something the team did not see coming.
Jon Favreau, a New Yorker by upbringing, said that parade moment was the point the phenomenon hit, in his words, “another level”.
On the set itself the craft is deliberately old school. Pedro Pascal acts opposite a puppet that is physically there, not painted and incorporated later by the effects team. The small unscripted reactions, Jon Favreau said, are what bring a heavy effects scene back to a human scale.
The same instinct ran through The Jungle Book in 2016, where the live reference came first and the digital layer came second. The end product looks expensive but still feels handmade and has an emotional touch to it.
Why Jon Favreau focuses so much on the father-son relationship?
Jon Favreau said that a small kid sitting in front of a TV in Queens is where the road to a Star Wars film starts for him. He was twelve when his mother died, and the household matters completely shifted to his father. His father was a school teacher who, weirdly, actually loved his work, and that stayed with him. Jon Favreau said,
“My dad was a school teacher, but loved what he did. And I learned early on that you should expect that of a of a life and of a career.”
College did not really appeal to him, so he dropped out, moved to Chicago for improv classes and spent his early twenties auditioning for very little. The first real break landed at twenty six, in the football movie Rudy.
The follow-ups did not come, so he wrote one himself, Swingers, with his friend Vince Vaughn, and that script opened the directing door for him. Elf in 2003 was only the second film he directed. Iron Man came in 2008 and blew the doors open, and The Mandalorian landed on Disney+ in 2019.
Now fifty-nine year old, Jon Favreau keeps coming back to the same word for the chance to put a Star Wars picture on the big screen. What he really wants, he said, is a film families will sit through together, the way he once sat through the original with his own family. The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters this week, with more Star Wars movies on the way over the coming years.
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Edited by Subho Mukhopadhyay