Who played luke in boba fett

This article contains spoilers for The Book of Boba Fett episode six from the very beginning

Many assumed The Last Jedi would be the last time we saw Luke Skywalker. The climax saw the iconic hero facing down the First Order on Crait and buying the Resistance enough time to beat a hasty retreat. His appearance proved to be a force projection from his home on Ahch-To and the strain of using this power killed him.

But death didn’t slow Luke down. He first appeared as a Force ghost in The Rise of Skywalker, and his younger self turned up to save the day in The Mandalorian‘s second season finale. That appearance took place while Luke was at the height of his power, and fans were thrilled at him slicing up Moff Gideon’s death troopers and taking on Grogu as his Padawan.

Now he’s back again. The Book of Boba Fett‘s sixth episode – ‘From the Desert Comes a Stranger’ – saw Din Djarin checking up on Luke and Grogu. What followed was heaven for Star Wars fans: extended scenes of Luke instructing Grogu in the ways of the Force, with a teaching style clearly influenced by Yoda. In addition, the episode’s cliffhanger almost certainly means Luke will return in The Mandalorian‘s third season later this year.

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So, who’s playing this de-aged Luke Skywalker? The answer is more complicated than you might think.

The Mandalorian’s Luke was created using deep fake technology: using AI to simulate a younger Mark Hamill from original trilogy footage and then-contemporary interviews. In The Mandalorian actor Max Lloyd-Jones ‘played’ Luke’s body, with voice synthesizer Respeecher used to recreate his voice. Hamill also appeared on set in full costume, though his performance was intended to be used just as a VFX reference and an aid for the cast.

Creative art manager at Lucasfilm Phil Szostak went into detail on their ambitions for Luke, saying in an interview that:

“For Luke especially, the aesthetic of his look is just about being faithful to what you know. But it’s more what you think you know, versus what it actually is. It’s almost like an elevation or a sketch of your memory versus being exactly, precisely one-to-one with the last time we saw him in the timeline, which would have been, you know, Return of the Jedi, and the supplemental narrative material that he was in for Battlefront II.”

Despite ILM’s efforts, this version of Luke was widely criticized for looking fake, with several YouTubers presenting their own takes on the scene. ILM and Lucasfilm paid attention and hired YouTuber Shamook based on his particularly impressive video, giving him the title of “Senior Facial Capture Artist”.

Shamook’s expertise was put to the test in The Book of Boba Fett, resulting in a much more realistic-looking and sounding Luke. According to the credits, Hamill returned to play Luke but it’s likely his performance was once again only used as a reference for the VFX artists. This time the credits indicate his body was played by two people: performance artist Graham Hamilton and stunt double Scott Lang, both of whom are listed as playing “Jedi”.

The Book of Boba Fett‘s deepfaked Luke had much more to do than in The Mandalorian, including running through the woods with Grogu on his back and demonstrating his lightsaber skills, all of which necessitated splitting the performance between three people.

Luke’s voice in the episode also followed the route used in The Mandalorian, being digitally recreated via the Respeecher voice synthesizer, though the sound team almost certainly also has an original voice track from Hamill to model the AI performance on.

So, The Book of Boba Fett‘s Luke is ‘played’ by a lot of people. Mark Hamill, Graham Hamilton, and Scott Lang acted on set as Luke, with a talented team of VFX artists (including YouTuber Shamook) responsible for the deepfaked performance. Voice work is a combination of Hamill’s old and new performances (potentially with an assist from Graham Hamilton) processed via the latest version of the Respeecher program.

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Deepfake technology is advancing at a rapid pace, and it’s telling how much Lucasfilm’s Luke has improved in the relatively short gap between The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. It’s still not perfect, but in another year’s time, I suspect the last few wrinkles will have been ironed out.

This tech maturing means it’s now open season on deepfaked characters in movies and TV, so expect to see de-aged versions of iconic characters popping up all over the place from now on. It’s a brave new world out there, and perhaps it won’t be too long before we get a Star Wars show or movie populated entirely with deepfaked classic heroes.

By Brett White

February 7, 2022 // 10:59am

As we’ve learned over the past few weeks, The Book of Boba Fett is a tome with many characters. Sometimes chapters include Boba Fett and the crime lords of Tatooine, and some chapters don’t include Fett at all. Sometimes they include stars of other Star Wars shows (hi, Din Djarin!) and sometimes they include Luke Skywalker.

That particular guest appearance, which filled up a whole lot of screen time in last week’s episode of Boba Fett, was a bit of a jaw-dropping feat. In order to make Mark Hamill look like he just walked off of the set of Return of the Jedi, a whole lot of CG magic had to be conjured up in order to make sure he looked and sounded like himself. And, well, the details and results of this sorcery are either terrific or terrifying, depending on your own point of view.

So, how did Luke Skywalker return for nearly an entire episode of The Book of Boba Fett? Well, the special effects team learned a thing or two from Luke’s cameo at the end of The Mandalorian Season 2. When Luke returned in that 2020 episode, he spent most of his time shrouded in a cloak and not talking. And when he finally showed his face, he… was… uh…

He looked really video game-y. As IndieWire reported back when that Mandalorian episode aired, Luke’s return actually did involve Mark Hamill. The OG Luke was on set and in costume during filming, and footage of 70-ish Mark Hamill was melded together with footage of a younger body double, Max Lloyd-Jones. That resulted in a CG Luke that wasn’t as successful as maybe Lucasfilm had hoped — and this was evidenced by the fact that the company hired a random YouTuber who touched up the CG Luke and made him look way better.

Now fast-forward to The Book of Boba Fett. While we don’t yet know what the process was like to bring Luke back this time around, there were some noticeable differences. For one thing, it doesn’t look like Hamill was involved and even Max Lloyd-Jones was recast; Graham Hamilton is credited as Luke’s performance artist and Scott Lang (no, not Ant-Man) is credited as CG Luke’s stunt double. And as Esquire highlighted, there’s another difference between 2022’s CG Luke and 2020’s CG Luke: the voice.

Instead of bringing Hamill in to record the new lines of dialogue, the series — including The Mandalorian, apparently! — instead used a program called Respeecher to make Luke sound like it’s 1983 all over again. Sound editor Matthew Wood described the process in an episode of Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian: “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.”

While the CG effects on Boba Fett do look noticeably better than they did on Mandalorian, Luke sounds a lot stiffer this time around. Maybe that’s because CG Luke didn’t have much to say before, but he has nearly a whole episode’s worth of one-sided conversations with Grogu — and if they sound a bit off, that’s why. Just to point out — it is wild that they didn’t use noted, celebrated, lauded voice actor Mark Hamill to voice Luke Skywalker. Sure, he sounds a few decades older, but surely it’s easier to clean up a new voice track than run hours and hours of audio through a computer program and have a robot splice words together to form a soulless audio performance. Now we have a Luke Skywalker appearance that, as far as we know, has not an ounce of living, breathing Mark Hamill in it.

So far, this is all Hamill has tweeted about “his” return to TV:

My hotel doesn't have @disneyplus.#RecklesslyFett_less

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) February 3, 2022

Ya gotta love the man.

So, is this the future of Star Wars? Will the franchise keep resurrecting characters from previous films, like they’ve now done with Grand Moff Tarkin, Princess Leia, and Luke Skywalker? Will Alec Guinness play Obi-Wan Kenobi alongside Ewan McGregor?? What once seemed impossible and, quite frankly, taboo doesn’t seem so farfetched now.

Stream The Book of Boba Fett on Disney+

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