The Perseverance of Diana Lee Inosanto and Becoming Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth

Hapa Mag - MARCH 10, 2021

By Lauren Lola

“Show yourself… Jedi.”

Out bursts the challenge at the beginning of the fifth episode of the second season of The Mandalorian. From the burnt forest of the planet Corvus walks Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano in her live-action debut. Above the gate leading into the town of Calodan stands a menacing-looking Diana Lee Inosanto as the merciless Magistrate Morgan Elsbeth. While it’s clear that she’s the big bad of the episode, audiences were unknowingly in store for quite an epic performance from her.

In her first interview following her appearance on The Mandalorian, Diana considered her role as the Magistrate a standout on her resume. “I mean, that was just an unbelievable godsend,” she remarked. “I really feel the Force was with me on that one.”

While her rise to stardom in the galaxy far, far away may have appeared overnight, Diana’s career as an actor and martial artist is one that’s spanned decades. Born and raised in the South Bay of Southern California, Diana was brought up in a multiracial household. Her mother is Irish and French and her father is Filipino, Chinese, and Spanish. She lived in Carson for a while, in a predominantly Black and Filipino neighborhood, and would spend summers with extended family up in Stockton.

“Stockton, California has a huge, huge Filipino community,” she explained, “and that’s where my family came into the country back around 1918 or 1920. My grandfather was what they call a pensionado (a student from the Philippines who studies abroad, with their expenses covered by the government).”

With martial artist Dan Inosanto being her father and Bruce Lee — or Uncle Bruce as Diana affectionately called him — her godfather, martial arts have been a central part of her life from a very young age. She grew up with martial arts equipment and weaponry as a common sight, and her father used to have a school in the backyard of their Carson residence before later establishing the Filipino Kali Academy of Torrance.

“It was my heritage, it was my culture,” she described, “so as a little girl, my father said not only do I want you to learn how to defend yourself as a woman, or as a little girl at the time, but I also just want you to be proud and know your heritage, know your culture.”

While Filipino martial arts are, as Diana called them, “the bread and butter of what I do,” she took a page from her father and godfather’s shared book and relished in the diversity of the martial arts world. She also knows Capoeira, Wushu, Jun Fan Gung Fu, and more. Even as she went on to pursue the performing arts like acting and dancing, Diana would eventually find herself circling back to martial arts as an adult and ultimately utilized it to forge a career for herself in Hollywood.

Diana has both stunt doubled and choreographed stunts for several TV shows and films over the years including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek Enterprise, and trained Melissa McCarthy for her role in Spy. Coincidentally, she even worked alongside people who also worked on the most recent season of The Mandalorian, such as actor Temuera Morrison in her big break on Barb Wire and director Robert Rodriguez on Alita: Battle Angel.

Being mixed-race in the stunt world has often been a double-edged sword for Diana. “When I was younger, as an actress, it was really hard to penetrate Hollywood, and because I was mixed, I wasn’t either white enough or I wasn’t Asian enough,” she explained. “They thought maybe I looked Spanish, but my Spanish was… it wasn’t second nature to me.”

On the other hand, it’s because she is mixed-race that she has stunt doubled for a wide variety of people such as Sarah Michelle Gellar and Margaret Cho.

Being both Asian and a woman in the stunt world has led Diana into additional obstacles along the way. As she elaborated, “It was kind of hard because sometimes you would hear people say things. I think they forgot that I was half Asian, and they would say things that were inappropriate.

“Then of course, as a woman in the stunt world, it was challenging too,” she added, “because sometimes you’re talking about a different time period where men were maybe trained not to pay attention to their words, so sometimes things would be said inappropriately [in a way] you could never say today.”

A lot of the double standards in the stunt world remain intact, as Diana observed through receiving fewer and fewer opportunities the older she’s gotten, compared to male counterparts her age. Instead of letting this discourage her, she took advice from her mom and a lesson from her Uncle Bruce’s life by casting circumstances to hell and began creating her own opportunities. She actively watched and took notes from film sets she was on when she wasn’t working, and eventually, she wrote, directed, and starred in the 2008 independent film, The Sensei.

The action-drama about a proficient martial artist training a bullied gay teenager was a culmination of bringing people together who believed in the nature and message of the project and making it happen under a small budget. Diana made many friendships and connections from working on it, even with the risks that came with filming on location in Colorado in the 2000s.

“I actually got death threats when I did my movie,” she explained. “It was really hard, but that’s how I [met] people in Washington D.C. I ended up having the Matthew Shepard Foundation advocate for my movie, and received an award in D.C. called the American Courage Award because they had heard about the struggles I had because I filmed it in Colorado.

“I was getting great pushback and we were in the press — in the Associated Press — just because there were some pretty mean, nasty people that were really trying to make it hard for me to film my movie,” she added, “but I stuck by my guns and [said] I am going to get this movie done because I think it’s important.”

The drive to persevere and to create opportunities is a lesson Diana passed along to her son, Sebastian Inosanto. Last fall, the two released a children’s book called The Curious Mind of Sebastian, which tells a true story of a mother understanding her son’s behavior following his diagnosis of autism. Diana wrote the book, while Sebastian illustrated it.

“I just told my son, ‘You and I are going to have to think outside the box. We have to kind of think like entrepreneurs, we have to think like Uncle Bruce, that we make our own circumstances, that we don’t sit back and wait and hope that people open the door for us,’” she had said to him. “I said, ‘Son, you’re an artist. There’s no reason now, especially with technology today, that we can’t make our own book.’”

It came as a surprise for Diana when her manager and producing partner called her, informing her that the producers of The Mandalorian wanted her to come in and audition for a role. She thought a prank was being pulled. As she emphasized, “I’ve been out floating out here, because to be honest with you, Lauren, I really thought my time was done, especially at my age.”

As she signed a non-disclosure agreement, she realized that this was really happening. She got right to work memorizing sides that gave nothing away about who this character was, aside from her personality. Despite being nervous prior to going in for the audition, she left feeling good about it afterwards. A few days later, her manager called again, informing her she got the role. About a month after that, she was brought to set, and the first person to greet her was show creator Jon Favreau.

He gave her a tour of the set before Diana met executive producer, Dave Filoni. She recalled trying to stay calm as he revealed everything from the fact that he would be directing her, that Dawson would be playing Ahsoka, and that the two would be in, what is now, the first fight scene between two women in a live-action Star Wars production.

As over the moon as Diana was, there was one question that was still lurking. “I’m like, ‘How in the world… how did you know who I am or how did you find me?’” she asked them.

Filoni and Favreau both explained to her that they wanted an authentic, real-life martial artist who could act for the role of the Magistrate. A search on Google for women martial artists and a few clicks later, the trailer for The Sensei was pulled up.

“It was The Sensei,” she said. “[Filoni] goes, ‘Oh, she can act.’ I go, ‘Are you telling me Google is my fairy godmother?’ He goes, ‘Yes.’”

Working on The Mandalorian was a very fulfilling experience for Diana. She liked how the stunt coordinator, Ryan Watson, designed the fight to match the capabilities of both her and Dawson and how about half the stunt team have trained under her father.

Diana and her fellow guest star understood the significance they would be bringing to the screen in their fight scene. “You have two women, two women of color doing the first big, iconic fight in the Star Wars franchise, so we really wanted to make this work, we really wanted to just rock,” she stated.

Alongside Diana was Michael Biehn who played Lang, a mercenary who works with the Magistrate. An actor known for his roles in sci-fi epics such as Alien and The Terminator, she found it a joy to work with him. “He’s such an extraordinary and wonderful actor. It was such an honor to have him by my side, or for me to be by his side, to be honest.”

Despite the many hours devoted to filming for The Mandalorian, Diana actually didn’t know the Magistrate’s name or history until the day the episode dropped on Disney+ last November.

“They never told me the name of my character, they never completely told me her background or history,” she explained, “so as I’m hearing [Dawson] say the name and my character’s history, I’m like, ‘Really? I did that? I mean, my character did that? What?’ It was crazy.”

The response to Diana’s appearance on The Mandalorian has been surreal for her, especially in the midst of the pandemic, where she can’t participate in the usual fanfare that comes with the lead-up to a new season of a show.

“In a way, it’s just very surreal to not experience that because I’ve seen, on the other hand, through social media, my name everywhere in conjunction with The Mandalorian, with Baby Yoda, with Ahsoka. Oh my gosh,” she said. “I mean, it’s strange. Then, to see the fans’ reactions, Star Wars fans are over the moon. To see their love for this franchise, for this show, has just been extraordinary. I love Star Wars fans. It’s through their eyes even more that I can enjoy this whole journey for me. It’s truly strange.”

Although the pandemic has slowed down the flow of Hollywood, it hasn’t slowed down the line of potential projects ahead of her. Diana has been having a lot more meetings with producers as of late and is currently attached to an upcoming animated project. She’s also hoping to produce a project called Way of the Cowboy, which would tell the true story of how her father Dan taught martial arts to the Dallas Cowboys in the late ’70s.

“The Dallas Cowboys were learning martial arts that actually helped them make it to the Super Bowl,” she explained. “It was through a man named Randy White, who was the defensive tackle [who] shared that if it wasn’t for my father teaching him, along with another gentleman by the name of Dr. Bob Ward, who was the sports scientist and conditioning coach, he would have never gotten the MVP, and maybe they would have never won the Super Bowl.”

From growing up a mixed-race girl in a martial arts world, to utilizing her skills in Hollywood, to forging opportunities for herself and her loved ones when the circumstances weren’t so good, to becoming the latest bad-ass villain in the world of Star Wars, Diana constantly demonstrates her power in perseverance and, like her namesake, her willingness to be like water. With her goals for the future and her family by her side, it’s evident that nothing — not lack of opportunities nor the pandemic — will stand in her way.

Lauren Lola is a San Francisco Bay Area-based author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth. She has written plays that have been produced at Bindlestiff Studio in San Francisco, and in 2020, she made her screenwriting debut with the short film, Breath of Writing, from Asiatic Productions. Aside from Hapa Mag, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.