How to keep a Baby Yoda-sized secret: Probably don’t tell your kids
By Meg Dowell
Bryce Dallas Howard went to great lengths to prevent her children from exposing The Mandalorian’s best-kept and most adorable secret.
“Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.”
Unless that child knows about Baby Yoda when millions of Star Wars fans cannot.
Bryce Dallas Howard couldn’t have kept The Child — widely referred to as Baby Yoda — a secret from her young children even if she’d tried.
While directing an episode of The Mandalorian during its first season, she brought her kids to work with her. Bringing children onto a Hollywood set isn’t unheard of. But imagine their excitement when they encountered Baby Yoda for the very first time.
“It was amazing to get to see my kids on a Star Wars set, just having the time of their life,” she said during an interview with Couch Surfing. Star Wars is, after all, a story made for children and generally appreciated by all.
There was just one problem: How was she going to convince her now Baby Yoda-obsessed younglings not to tell every single human they encountered about what they had seen?
“The thing that was terrifying was the notion of having children on a set, and what was gonna happen with kids seeing Baby [Yoda].”
Howard has spoken previously about how her kids constantly asked about The Child while on set. She was worried that when she released them back into the “real world,” they would tell someone they shouldn’t about a secret she very much needed them to not reveal.
So she prepared for a long and repetitive routine to ensure their silence.
“My kids, every single day when they were going back to school, before school, I would say, ‘Who do we not talk about today?’ And they would be like, ‘Baby [Yoda]!'”
Clearly — as far as we know — it worked. No one expected the first episode of The Mandalorian to end with the reveal that another member of Yoda’s species existed.
We know a lot more going into season 2 than we’d particularly like to know. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other major secrets artfully hidden in the shadows, just waiting for us to discover them.
You can say no surprise will ever top Baby Yoda. But chances are, you’ve been wrong about these things before.
With Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni in charge, anything is possible.
Next. Baby Yoda does have a name, but you’ll have to keep saying Baby Yoda for now. dark
The second season of The Mandalorian drops on Disney+ this October.