🤠 JOHN WAYNE’S GRANDSON SAYS EVERY MOVE IN THE MANDALORIAN WAS INSPIRED BY THE LEGEND HIMSELF. K2

Brendan Wayne; John Wayne.Credit: Lucasfilm; Getty

The Mandalorian and Grogu star Brendan Wayne is sharing how his grandfather, John Wayne, influenced his performance as the titular stoic bounty hunter.

The actor, who physically embodies Mando alongside Pedro Pascal (who voices the character and plays him without the helmet) and Lateef Crowder (who handles the stuntwork), tells Entertainment Weekly that he had to learn to be present in a scene to play the heavily armored character on the Emmy-winning Star Wars series.

“I had to really learn stillness, and it’s really been one of the greatest things I’ve learned as an actor,” Wane says. “For me, that journey, I always fought that because my grandfather was exceptional at being present and radiating whatever [was happening around him]. John Ford loved to say to him, ‘The less I give you, Duke, the better the movie is going to be.’ It sounds like a slight, but it was more about if you just be there, it’s as powerful as anything.”

He found himself bringing a bit of his grandfather’s serenity to the character when working with directors Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Deborah Chow, and Rick Famuyiwa on the first three seasons of The Mandalorian. 

“When they were directing me, the more still I became, the more I became like my grandfather, the more I became like the samurai that he studied,” Wayne says. “Every movement had a meaning; you don’t waste them. And with samurai, every movement is a kill movement.”

Which is exactly how Mando operates, too. “That’s Mando. Those are the precepts that he works upon,” he notes, “and so to have that trust in yourself that whatever you’re living in that moment — if I’m working with Katee [Sackhoff] as Bo-Katan or Emily Swallow — as long as you’re present, that’s 90 percent of the work.”

It was also important to Wayne that Mando always appear calm and collected — even when the cameras weren’t rolling.

“I would get to set two and a half, three hours early, I’d do my workout, and then I’d go spend an hour at least walking the set, because I never wanted Mando to fall down in front of the crew,” he says. “I wanted him to be as smooth as my grandfather, Clint Eastwood, or Yul Brynner in Westworld. I wanted him as smooth as could be so that every movement did matter.”

As fate would have it, he’s not the only member of the Wayne family who’s part of the Star Wars universe. He told PEOPLE that he was completely unaware, when singing on to play Mando, that his grandfather’s voice had been used for the Galactic Empire spy Garindan ezz Zavor in A New Hope.

“Back in the day, when we used film, they found the soundtrack on the ground in the editing room,” he said. “And they knew it was from True Grit. They took his voice [from stock audio], and they did whatever they do, their magic.”

But don’t worry, Wayne is completely fine with “riding the coattails of my grandfather” when it comes to playing a role in a galaxy far, far away. “I had hoped I might have been able to be the first in this,” he teased, “but no, sadly, I was still second.'”

The Mandalorian and Grogu is in theaters now.