He was played by Ray Park. Nuff said. He's a grunt, a thug a henchman, no matter how powerful. Lucas had no plans with him, the reason he captures the imagination so much is that he's pretty much a blank slate suitable for projection of "cool" attributes. At that point, the Sith were playing a devious & subtle endgame of infiltration and subversion ( "Sidious" & "Tyrannus" being more appropriately suggestive names, rather than "Maul" ), and using scare tactics to create a scenario to take over and sandbag the Jedi. Maul might look all scary and intimidating, but there's not a lot he can do with that face, aside from be an executioner or intimidator. Even as a cog in the narrative, he no longer fits, because it's about the subversion and temptation of Anakin Skywalker. There's no role for a back-flipping, gimmick-sword-wielding devil-faced thug in that story. Count Dooku serves as a cautionary warning, and his defeat costs Anakin, being another step down the path to the Dark Side. Palpatine/Sidious, of course, is obvious in his role, and much better realized than in the original trilogy, IMO. In fact, his performance and characterization in the prequels flesh out his character in RotJ and actually make his actions and motivations more plausible. There was a lot of confusion back in the 80s about why he would openly encourage his potential recruit to kill his right-hand man and most valuable henchman... until you see that's how he got Vader in the first place.

I agreed with his briefly mentioned idea of Anakin being a teenager in the first one, but I think Obi-Wan, like Yoda, works better as a mentor figure for both trilogies, or at most, the Han Solo (albeit of a very different character and type) to Anakin's Luke.


By the way, do you post in the comments of Cinnamon Bunzuh?