Raising Kanan is officially back, and now fans can see what Kanan has been up to. The show left off with Kanan killing his business partner Ronnie in an effort to protect his mother, Raq. Mekai Curtis shares how that decision has affected his character’s role as a businessman when we see him in season 4.
“That’s a catch-22. I think it brings a bit of, like, reverence and respect, but it also brings a bit of restriction,” Mekai says. “A theme that kind of circulates throughout the show with a lot of the characters is there’s so much thinking on your heels and having to call audibles out of nowhere, like, you’ll do that in the moment, but then you have to kind of go back and clean up whatever came with that.”
Of the tension between Kanan and his mother, Mekai says Raq’s decision to kill his father, Detective Howard, did not make anything better.
“Though it was kind of rocky and fraught with Howard, that was one of the few spaces he had that he was able to explore freely without judgment, without coercion,” Mekai says. “Now he doesn’t have that anymore at the hands of the person who’s been trying to shape his entire existence from [the] jump.”
With all that Kanan is experiencing and more to be revealed in season 4, Mekai says fans will see his character work through it all being mindful of his duality.
“There is a bit of a pressure that he kind of carries [as the son of two drug lords]. There’s a stoicism, there’s a strategicness. There’s a strength he has to carry with that,” Mekai says. “But on the other side, he literally just lost his father. … This is an emotional ride. It was fun. It was a stretch.”
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