CAUTION: Spoilers for The Mandalorian season one finale below.
Adam Pally may be best known for one of the greatest modern moments in late-night TV, but he’s also a successful stand-up and actor who also broke an award show. And he also nearly broke Baby Yoda, it seems.
Pally was a surprise guest star of the final episode of The Mandalorian last year in which he played a scout trooper alongside Jason Sudeikis. In the episode, “Redemption,” the troopers await word from Moff Gideon about what to do with The Child (AKA Baby Yoda), who they stole from Kuiil and were storing in a satchel while hanging out on some speeder bikes.
In the scene, Pally actually punched The Child when it bit his character, which caused the internet to freak out when they watched the episode. But as Pally explains, he was far more gentle with the adorable puppet than it seemed. and intentionally so.
Pally spoke to reporters at TCA on Saturday and according to TV Line, gave a very expensive puppet a bit too rough a go the first time he went through the scene. So much so that showrunner Jon Favreau had to pull him aside and make sure he knew how much it cost Disney to make the beloved puppet.
“I remember the first take that I did when I punched it…,” Pally told reporters at TCA. “They called ‘cut’ and Jon, who was watching on a monitor in his office, came down and said, “‘I just want to let you know that this is the hero [expensive puppet] and it costs, like, $5 million. I want you to hit it, but I want you to know that.’”
Pally said that he was so “nervous” knowing he was hitting a $5 million puppet that he struggled to get through subsequent takes.
“The next three takes I missed, because I was so nervous,” Pally said.
Eventually he got through it, and it made for a classic Taika Waititi-directed moment. And thankfully, The Child seems to be just fine as well. Pally joked that he was a “diva” and “constantly vaping” but also talked about how cool it was to be in a project like The Mandalorian.
“I’ve been friends with Favreau for a little bit, and he said he has this thing where he needed someone to ‘do something special.’ That was kind of the headline I got. So Jason and I talked and were like, ‘Yeah, we really want to be part of it.’ It seemed exciting.”
But after landing the fun gig, “It was very hard to keep it a secret,” Pally noted with a laugh.
The secret is out now, as is the rough cost of the most talked-about puppet in recent memory.
[via TV Line]
