If you’re the kind of person who spends an inordinate amount of time contemplating the backstories of minor movie characters—if you are, in essence, the sort of person who reads unauthorized biographies of fictional men—then you already know who Dr. Cornelius Evazan is. Or at least you think you do.
He’s the guy in Star Wars who tells Luke Skywalker, “I don’t like you either,” which, when you think about it, is an absolutely bonkers thing to say to someone you’ve never met. It’s up there with starting a first date by saying, “I have several restraining orders.” And then, just as quickly as he arrives in your consciousness, he gets his friend’s arm chopped off by Obi-Wan Kenobi and disappears forever. Or so you assume.
But what if I told you that Dr. Evazan—a man who looks like a rejected Twilight Zone makeup test—was once a respected doctor? Not just a doctor, but an innovator in the field of whatever it was he thought he was doing. Of course, that was before the, uh, unethical experiments. Before the botched surgeries. Before he turned into some kind of intergalactic Dr. Mengele operating out of a space-bus station.
This is his story. And it’s insane.
The Early Years: When a Young Evazan Thought He Would Change the Galaxy
There is no definitive record of where Dr. Evazan was born, which is precisely the kind of thing you’d expect from a guy whose only known associates are criminals and guys who introduce themselves by how much they don’t like you. But the prevailing theory is that he grew up somewhere in the Core Worlds, likely educated in an elite medical institution—because even mad scientists have to start somewhere.
At some point, Evazan must have been a real doctor, which implies there was a period of time where he was actually competent. Maybe even brilliant. You don’t just wake up one day and say, “You know what? I bet I could rewire a Wookiee’s nervous system if I just jam some wires into it.” You need training to think that badly.
But much like every tech bro who starts out building an app that helps people find public restrooms and ends up selling their soul to venture capital, Evazan made a turn. A dark, unethical, and very unsanitary turn.
The Descent into ‘Mad Scientist’ Territory
At some point, Dr. Evazan’s interest in surgery took a slight detour into playing God. He started performing “transformative” operations, which in theory sounds fine. Except the transformations were… bad. Really bad. Like “wake up with an extra head” bad. Like “congratulations, I gave you wings, but they’re non-functional, and also your lungs don’t work anymore” bad.
It’s unclear whether Evazan was actually trying to help people or if he was just messing around with sentient beings like a kid with a broken action figure. But the more disturbing detail is that he probably thought he was helping. There’s something uniquely terrifying about a villain who believes he’s doing good. A guy who knows he’s evil is just a guy who wants money or power. A guy who thinks he’s a visionary is the guy who convinces himself that splicing a Mon Calamari’s DNA with a Bantha is a good idea.
And here’s the thing: His patients? They didn’t want these procedures. He was more forcing them into medical experiments, which is usually frowned upon (even in a galaxy where people regularly sell their children to sand wizards). That’s how he went from “eccentric surgeon” to having the death sentence on twelve systems.
The Rogue One Era: Wandering Through a Warzone
By the time we catch a glimpse of Evazan in Rogue One, he’s on Jedha, still hanging out with his equally unsavory friend Ponda Baba. And while Jedha is basically the last place you’d want to be if you were on the run—what with the Empire strip-mining its kyber crystals and a full-scale rebellion brewing—it makes a twisted kind of sense for Evazan. When you’re a wanted man on the run, blending in with an occupied city full of smugglers, radicals, and desperate people probably seems like a decent strategy.
That is, until the Death Star decides to test its new “gently obliterate a city” setting, which turns Jedha into a crater. We don’t know exactly how he and Ponda Baba escaped the blast, but somehow, they did. And somehow, despite being one of the most wanted criminals in the galaxy, he didn’t get vaporized by the Empire or gunned down by the Rebellion. Instead, he made his way to the one place in the galaxy that seemed to attract the absolute worst people: Tatooine.
Tatooine: Where Bad People Go to Get Worse
Once you’re banned from practicing medicine across the galaxy, there aren’t a lot of options left. You can either become a bounty hunter (which requires athletic ability), a smuggler (which requires charm), or a guy who just exists in a wretched hive of scum and villainy (which requires nothing at all). Evazan chose the latter.
That’s how he wound up in the Mos Eisley Cantina, hanging out with Ponda Baba, who at this point really should’ve found a new friend. What exactly was he doing in that bar all day? Just drinking? Giving unsolicited medical advice? Trying to convince people that having three arms is actually better than two? No one knows.
What we do know is that when he decided to antagonize some random farm kid who just wandered into the bar, he unknowingly picked the worst possible guy to start trouble with. Within seconds, Obi-Wan Kenobi—an old man who had been doing absolutely nothing up until this moment—decided to reignite his war criminal past and slice Ponda Baba’s arm clean off.
Did Evazan survive? Clearly. Because a guy who has already evaded death sentences on twelve systems, a Death Star strike, and now Obi-Wan Kenobi isn’t just a lunatic—he’s a cockroach.
The Legacy of Dr. Evazan: A Man Who Thought He Was a Genius, But Was Just a Lunatic
Dr. Evazan is one of the strangest characters in Star Wars, not because he’s powerful or important, but because he’s such a weird failure. He had everything: intelligence, skill, and the ability to do real medical work. But instead of using that to make the galaxy better, he used it to create human horror shows.
This is why I love Star Wars. It’s a universe where even the most insignificant characters have wild backstories. Where a guy with one line of dialogue isn’t just a nameless thug but a disgraced surgeon with twelve death sentences who once tried to create a species with no bones.
It’s a place where heroes rise from nowhere, villains lurk in every shadow, and even the cantina’s most forgettable barflies have lived entire lifetimes of chaos and catastrophe. Dr. Evazan could have been a brilliant doctor, a galactic pioneer. Instead, he became a cautionary tale—proof that not every backstory leads to greatness. Some just lead to bad decisions, a ruined career, and a severed arm that, for once, wasn’t his own.