Nik Sant was a human male who fought for the Alliance to Restore the Republic's military during the Galactic Civil War. By 4 ABY, specifically the time of the Battle of Endor, Sant had become recognized as one of the Rebel Alliance's most experienced scouts.
During the Galactic Civil War, Nik Sant was a member of the Alliance to Restore the Republic, and by 4 ABY he had become one of the most seasoned scouts within the Alliance Military. In that year, the Rebel Alliance initiated a crucial offensive against the Galactic Empire during the Battle of Endor, with the objective of destroying the Empire's second Death Star superweapon. Sant, who was a Pathfinder, was part of a strike team led by General Han Solo with the mission of destroying the shield generator powering the Death Star's shields.
The operation proved successful, enabling Alliance forces to obliterate the orbiting Death Star and significantly weaken the Empire. Before the main ground battle, he put on the armor of an scout trooper that had been captured and assumed the trooper's position at the shield generator bunker. Although the Imperials were able to see through his disguise and capture him, along with the rest of the strike team, he was rescued when the local Ewok tribe launched an ambush against the Imperials, which allowed Solo and the other Rebels to destroy the shield generator.
Nik Sant made a short appearance as a member of Han Solo's strike team in the 1983 movie Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. He was first identified by the name Nik Sant in The Official Star Wars Fact File 44 in 2002. According to a continuity polaroid from Return of the Jedi, one "L. Burner" played the role.
The similarities observed between Sant's appearance and that of Rex, the former Clone Captain who appears in both the Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels television series, led to speculation that Sant and Rex might be the same person. In 2016, Dave Filoni, the executive producer, speculated at a screening of the second season finale of Star Wars Rebels that the "bearded old guy on Endor," Nik Sant, could be Rex, arguing that it wouldn't make sense for an "old guy" to be on Endor unless it was someone like Rex. The Rebels series finale, which aired on March 5, 2018, confirmed that Rex was indeed present at the Battle of Endor, but stopped short of confirming that Rex and Sant were the same individual. Six months after the broadcast of the episode, Filoni disclosed in an interview with IGN that he ultimately decided against officially making the theory canon, explaining that he didn't want to definitively state one way or the other regarding a character that existed before he joined Star Wars, and that Rex could have been at Endor without being Sant. Because he deliberately left it ambiguous, he stated that some fans could choose to believe that Sant and Rex are the same, while others could choose not to.
In recreations of scenes from Return of the Jedi featured in the Star Wars Galaxy of Adventures short "Han Solo - From Smuggler to General," Rex is shown wearing clone trooper armor in place of Sant. Rex also appears in original scenes within the short. Because Galaxy of Adventures shorts should not be interpreted as literal events, no official source has definitively confirmed that Sant and Rex are the same character to date.