George Lucas wanted to chronicle the rise of Emperor Palpatine “like Hitler’s” as part of a scrapped Star Wars TV show.
Palpatine actor Ian McDiarmid has now discussed plans for the cancelled series, which he was told of directly by Lucas. The Star Wars creator pitched him the idea of featuring in the project — although, of course, it ultimately never made it into production.
“[George Lucas] was talking about, I think I can tell you now, a television series,” Ian McDiarmid told an audience at Spacecon 2026 (thanks, Popverse). At the time we didn’t think about Star Wars in terms of television series. Very speculative.
“We had lunch one day, and he said ‘I’ve got this idea, and I hope you might want to be involved. We could sort of follow the Emperor’s progress, like Hitler’s, some of that. There might be an assassination attempt, and of course it wouldn’t succeed.’
“It sounded really exciting,” McDiarmid concluded. “And he also said that maybe you could direct one, and then I fainted. But sadly, that didn’t come to pass.”
While McDiarmid didn’t mention the planned series by name, it sounds a lot like this plan referred to Lucas’ long-gestating Star Wars Underworld project, which would have bridged the gap between Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope with at least 60 episodes of television. Lucas worked on the idea for years before ultimately selling the franchise’s rights to Disney, writing numerous scripts in the process that have never seen the light of day. Our only real glimpse at the show remains a brief leak of test footage for the series, which showed a gritty version of galactic captial city planet Coruscant.
Last year, Star Wars prequels producer Rick McCallum described the project’s loss as “one of the great disappointments of our lives,” though suggested it had always been doomed to failure by Lucas’ ambition, with individual episodes bigger in scope than Star Wars movies — something that would have seen costs spiralling to at least $40 million per episode using the technology available at the time.
Of course, Star Wars’ Disney-owned era has seen the saga spawn numerous new TV series, though spending has now been significantly curtailed following big budget flops such as The Acolyte and The Book of Boba Fett. Just one Star Wars series currently remains in production: the second and likely final season of Ahsoka, which is due to premiere next year.
On the movie front, The Mandalorian and Grogu has struggled at the box office, but Lucasfilm reportedly thinks next year’s Star Wars: Starfighter has a better chance of reviving the franchise.
Image credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
