Beau Willimon

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Beau Willimon is going from House of Cards to House of Jedi.

The playwright and screenwriter has been tapped to work the script for Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi, Lucasfilm’s feature that is to be directed by James Mangold.

Willimon is joining Mangold to write the script for the project that will trace the origins of the Force and be set 25,000 years before any of the timelines and stories told by the movies and shows so far.

Dawn of the Jedi, which is a working title, was first unveiled almost exactly one year ago, at the last Star Wars Celebration, held in London in April 2023.

“When I first started talking to Kathy [Kennedy] about doing one of these pictures, what occurred to me was thinking about what kind of genre of movie within Star Wars I wanted to do,” Mangold said at the time. “And I thought about a biblical epic, like a Ten Commandments, about the dawning of the Force. Where did the Force come from, when did we discover it, when did we learn how to use it?”

The project, like most Star Wars initiatives, had been under a Sith shroud of secrecy ever since.

The feature has no release date, but Mangold is expected to turn his attention to Dawn of the Jedi after he wraps A Complete Unknown, his Bob Dylan biopic that stars Timothée Chalamet and is being made by Disney arm Searchlight Pictures. The next Star Wars movie is slated to be The Mandalorian & Grogu, which on Friday received a May 22, 2026, release date.

Dawn of the Jedi is not Willimon’s first time in hyperspace. The scribe worked on season one of Andor, the acclaimed and Emmy-nominated Star Wars series focused on the character played by Diego Luna. Willimon wrote three episodes, including the prison breakout installment titled “One Way Out.” The episode earned Willimon an Emmy nomination for outstanding writing for a drama series and featured the heartbreaking line, “I can’t swim,” uttered by Andy Serkis.

The writer is known for his dramatic prowess and his work features political undertones and deals with themes of power. House of Cards was set in the halls of Washington, D.C., and was one of the most acclaimed series of the mid-2010s, helping put Netflix on the map as a destination for original television. He also co-wrote the George Clooney-Ryan Gosling political thriller The Ides of March and created Hulu’s space drama The First.

He is repped by WME and Schreck Rose.