Mark Hamill may have returned to the role of Luke Skywalker for The Mandalorian’s season two finale – but his voice did not.
Season two of Disney Plus’s Star Wars spin-off series ended with a dramatic cameo from Hamill, with de-aging technology used to make the actor appear time period-appropriate.
However, it has now been revealed that, though Hamill was used for the character’s appearance, he didn’t actually speak Luke’s lines.
The show’s creator, Jon Favreau, made the revelation on a new Disney Gallery episode about the making of The Mandalorian’s second season finale.
“Something people didn’t realise is that his voice isn’t real,” he said.
“His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesised using an application called Respeecher.”
According to Favreau, the artificial voice was assembled using archival material from Mark Hamill speaking as Luke Skywalker when he was younger.
“I had archival material from Mark in that era,” he said. “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.”
The Mandalorian can be streamed now on Disney Plus.
