The sixth episode of The Book of Boba Fett, “From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” was a big one for fans of the Star Wars Disney+ shows. Not only did we get the long-awaited return of Grogu, but Clone Wars‘ Cad Bane made his live-action debut. Another character fans didn’t expect to see on The Book of Boba Fettย is Luke Skywalker, who also appeared in the Season 2 finale of Star Wars: The Mandalorian. Fans have mixed reactions about the de-aged Luke, who was not played by Mark Hamill in the new episode. Not only did actor and voice artist Graham Hamilton take on the role of Luke’s motion-capture character with the help of some deepfake technology, but his voice was created with the help of a program called Lola. ILM Supervisor Richard Bluff recently spoke with Esquire and explained how Lola brought Luke to life.ย
“They effectively reproduced a de-aged version of Mark for the shots by combining the texture from his face and also [the body double’s] younger face. The biggest challenge for this sequence was that we weren’t de-aging Mark in every single shot, and we had a variety of performances that Lola had to work on, too,” Bluff explained.ย
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In the interview, sound editor Matthew Wood further explained how they created the digital replica of Hamill’s younger voice.ย
“It’s a neural network you feed information into and it learns. So I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR from the original films, a book on tape he’d done from those eras, and then also Star Wars radio plays he had done back in that time. I was able to get clean recordings of that, feed it into the system, and they were able to slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data,” he explained
As for Hamill, the actor’s current pinned tweet on Twitter is a declaration that he hasn’t seen the episode yet. “My hotel doesn’t have @disneyplus. #RecklesslyFett_less,” Hamill wrote. You can view the tweet below:
How do you feel about The Book of Boba Fett including Luke Skywalker without Mark Hamill? Tell us in the comments!ย
The Book of Boba Fett finale hits Disney+ on February 7th.ย
