Jeremy Allen White Says Finding Rotta the Hutt’s Voice Was Freer Than Playing Bruce Springsteen

Jeremy Allen White has now given one of the better descriptions yet of what makes The Mandalorian and Grogu such a strange swing. Speaking in Empire-backed coverage surfaced this month, White said playing Rotta the Hutt gave him “a bit more freedom” than playing Bruce Springsteen, because Springsteen’s voice is so instantly recognizable. Rotta, by contrast, gave him more room to experiment — including, in his words, the fact that “my speaking voice changes [as Rotta].” That is a weird comparison on paper, but it actually tells you a lot about what kind of performance this is.

Rotta Is Clearly Not Being Played as a Joke

That matters because White is not just voicing some throwaway CGI creature. Lucasfilm has already confirmed that he plays Rotta the Hutt in The Mandalorian and Grogu, the upcoming theatrical Star Wars film opening May 22, 2026. Official material has also made it clear that Rotta is being positioned as a real presence in the movie, not just a quick nostalgia cameo for people who remember The Clone Wars.

The Springsteen Comparison Actually Makes Sense

The Bruce Springsteen angle sounds odd until you think about the acting problem White is describing. Playing Springsteen in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere meant working around one of the most famous voices in American music, with an audience that already knows exactly how “right” or “wrong” it should sound. Rotta is the opposite challenge. White still had to find something specific, but he had more freedom to shape it, bend it, and make it feel like its own thing. That likely explains why he has also said there is “a little bit of Huttese” in the performance and that listening to Jabba helped him find the zone.

That Could Be Good News for the Movie

Honestly, this is probably what fans wanted to hear. Rotta was always going to be one of the film’s strangest ingredients, especially now that he is no longer the tiny kidnapped Hutt from The Clone Wars movie. Recent coverage around the film has already shown Rotta as a much more physically imposing figure, and White’s comments suggest the voice is being treated with the same idea in mind: familiar enough to feel like Star Wars, but different enough to feel like this specific version of Rotta.

The Stranger This Sounds, the Better It Gets

At this point, The Mandalorian and Grogu keeps sounding like a movie that knows it can get away with being a little weird. A jacked Rotta the Hutt voiced by the guy who also played Bruce Springsteen was already not a sentence anybody had on their Star Wars bingo card. But White’s comments make it sound less random than it first did. He is not just doing a celebrity voice cameo. He is trying to build a performance with its own texture, and that makes Rotta immediately more interesting.

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