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Scholars call it the monomyth, although most of us know it as the hero’s journey—the ancient storytelling structure about a nobody from nowhere who answers the call to adventure, befriends a wise elder, faces down impossible obstacles, and emerges not just victorious but as a champion for others.

Folklore, myths, and religious parables are filled with this narrative, of course, and the framework still defines some of our most beloved modern characters: Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, Elliott from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Nowhere is it used more than in Star Wars, where every film, book, and TV show plays as a variation on the arc.

There’s one hero’s journey connected to a galaxy far, far away that happens to be true—and it belongs to a guy named Dave Filoni.

Filoni is a cowboy-hat-wearing, hockey-loving, wolf-obsessed writer, director, and producer from Pittsburgh. He was a young animation director when George Lucas asked if he would join him and, together, create the Lucasfilm founder’s final run of Star Wars stories. That project was The Clone Wars animated series, which began in 2008 and ended abruptly after six seasons when Lucas sold the company to Disney in 2012. George moved on. Dave stayed. What Obi-Wan Kenobi was to Luke Skywalker, what Han Solo was to Rey, that’s what Lucas became to Filoni.

Dave Filoni on the set of The Mandalorian, directing the masked anti-hero. Photograph by François Duhamel.

Fifteen years later, Filoni, 45, is not-so-jokingly known as The Chosen One, the carrier of the creator’s knowledge. He mixed that mentorship with his own skills and interests to craft the hit animated Rebels and Resistance shows, and now serves as executive producer and one of the directors of The Mandalorian, the live-action Star Wars TV series that the Disney+ streaming service made the centerpiece of its November 12 launch. In February, he will resurrect The Clone Wars for a seventh and final season. And you can expect to see Filoni’s name on other major projects in the years to come.

He’s become so beloved within the Star Wars fandom that people sometimes cosplay as him at conventions. That affection comes not just from the stories he’s told, but because he’s so clearly a fan too.

People from Filoni’s Western Pennsylvania neighborhood tend to stick to the familiar, but Star Wars made him dream of distant suns. He came to Southern California to make animation. Still, the journey from fanboy to Jedi master remains unbelievable to him. “I thought it was a practical joke,” he said, recalling the 2005 telephone call asking him to travel to San Francisco to meet Lucas about a job. At the time Filoni was a director and story artist on Nickelodeon’s mystical martial arts show Avatar: The Last Airbender. He thought the crew from SpongeBob SquarePants was punking him. Even when he grasped that it was real, he didn’t believe it was really real. “My whole expectation honestly was: I’m going to meet George Lucas, and I’ll have a great story when I’m in line to go see [Revenge of the Sith] that nobody else has. But I’m certainly not going to get this job,” Filoni said.