Have Luke Skywalker and Boba Fett got the band back together? For three decades, Mark Hamill took a good long break from playing Luke Skywalker. He wasn’t entirely out of the Star Wars-verse: He voiced Darth Bane on the teens show Clone Wars. (Hamill has enjoyed a prolific and acclaimed second life as a voice actor. His Joker, starting with Batman: The Animated Series, is up there with the best.) But it wasn’t until 2015’s The Force Awakens that he returned as the character that made his name, though it would take till The Last Jedi that he actually uttered a line. Now Hamill’s Luke Skywalker regularly returns to the franchise, even popping up on an episode of The Mandalorian, the show about a Boba Fett-like bounty hunter.
But does Hamill bring Luke Skywalker back for The Book of Boba Fett, the hot new Disney+ show about one of the series’ most beloved side characters?
The answer is: Yep, in the show’s sixth episode. And it’s not the older, grizzled, bitter yet still heroic version of Luke you saw in The Last Jedi. The Book of Boba Fett takes place shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi, so you get younger, virile, and still optimistic Luke Skywalker. Thanks to the kind of CGI that produced younger Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, we get 70-year-old Hamill as a young man, training Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. He even gets to chat a bit with Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka.
De-aging CGI has become commonplace in movies and shows, but if his voice sounds weird, that’s because it is. As reported by /Film, Hamill’s voice is never actually heard. Instead, audio wizards used cutting edge tech to create his dialogue whole cloth using archival recordings and algorithms — which is definitely not the kind of tech that could lead to real-world trouble.