The Best Star Wars Character Design Is Thanks To An Accident 

Character designer Iain McCaig was responsible for creating the look of Darth Maul. Originally, the only real design guidance for the Sith villain was that Lucas said this should be “a figure from your worst nightmare.” He did his job a little too well, and the Star Wars creator feared that the first design might be a little too intense.

This anecdote highlights how difficult it was for McCaig to finalize the look of Darth Maul. At first, the designer thought he should make the new bad guy look a bit more like the classic villain of the Original Trilogy. Accordingly, he tried to create a design reminiscent of Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art for Darth Vader, but he decided to ditch the idea in favor of something new.

Eventually, he decided that a new Sith Lord like Darth Maul should have an entirely new look. For inspiration, he started drawing different art department members as Sith Lords, trying to channel their personalities into unique designs. At one point, he even had an idea for a Darth Maul with a kind of circuit board face, and considering how much Lucas liked this design, it’s amazing that it never made it into the final film.

All of these iterations brought McCaig much closer to what would become the final design for Darth Maul. He added the tattoos, but perhaps remembering George Lucas calling that first design too intense, he decided to soften the new design by adding feathers to the top of the Sith Lord’s head. It may be goofy to imagine, but McCaig thought that the character getting the feathers to stick up in just the right way was part of how he would achieve the focus necessary for his Jedi-hunting methods.

As far as McCaig was concerned, he now had the final design for Darth Maul, feathers and all. Here’s where it gets interesting, though: the other artists who looked at McCaig’s new design didn’t read the feathers for what they were. Everyone assumed the feathers were meant to be horns, and those horns ended up becoming a primary design element for the character.

Whether you loved or hated The Phantom Menace (honestly, the prequels now seem like gold compared to most of the Sequel Trilogy), everyone can agree that Darth Maul was the best part of that controversial film. His red skin, cool tattoos, and dangerous-looking horns all made the character into an instant icon. However, in the best Star Wars tradition, the unforgettable horn design was the result of a complete accident.

Of course, we can never rule out the idea that this might have been the will of the Force. Maybe the ghost of a Jedi master told the rest of the artists what to do? We can practically hear Yoda’s admonishment now: “feathers, circuit boards…a Jedi craves not these things.”