Classic Star Wars Actor Talks About Return In Rogue One

One of the most fun fan moments in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story came during the epic Battle of Scarif, the dogfight in space when the Rebel Fleet one their first major victory against the Empire. During the battle, out of nowhere, there's Red and Gold Leader, straight out of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. It's clearly the same actors, and somehow it's not all the exact same dialogue! More CGI magic? Not so fast - this came from Gareth Edwards literally finding the old reel-to-reel negatives and pulling some archive footage for the film, restored into the high-resolution of today.

But even more importantly, Angus MacInnes, who played Jon "Gold Leader" Vander in the original Star Wars, returned for the film, both in the form of archive footage and newly recorded dialogue to give it a new flare.

"It's fabulous makeup," MacInnes joked in an interview with Jamie Stangroom. "They contacted me and said they wanted to use the footage and could they, and I said yeah! They wanted me to voice it, so we re-recorded the dialogue for the sequence with little tweaks here and there. It was important to change it so we didn't use the same dialogue at Yavin and here."

The actor said it was "a little disorienting" to see himself on the big screen in a role he performed 40 years ago in a brand new movie, but "it was nice" to survive a battle.

"It wasn't substantially different [dialogue]; if you look at it like it was a bunch of spitfires, they basically go through the same routine everytime they attack. This is very similar, but things like 'watch out for those towers' was a new line. We revoiced the entire thing, but the dialogue was largely the same," thanks to the similar style of battle, MacInnes said.

As for being a living Easter egg? "It's great!" the actor said with a laugh. He also said he found Peter Cushing's digital revival "kind of creepy."

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is in theaters now. Directed by Gareth Edwards, it's the first of the new standalone features from Lucasfilm and Disney, which take place outside the core "Skywalker Saga" of films noted by an Episode number. Rogue One tells the story of the small band of rebels that were tasked with stealing the plans to the first Death Star. The story spins directly off the opening crawl from the original Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. In that crawl, it read: "Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire. During the battle, Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the DEATH STAR, an armored space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet."