Mark Hamill’s Mandalorian Appearance Wasn’t What We Thought
More secrets have been revealed about Mark Hamill's appearance in The Mandalorian season 2.
This article is more than 2 years old
The division of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, or ILM has been using cutting-edge special effects technology and implementing them into the Star Wars films since its inception nearly five decades ago when Star Wars first graced the big screen. The franchise has continued to evolve with the times and de-aged their initial stars in order for them to appear on screen as their younger selves. Fans saw a young Princess Leia in Rogue One and both young Leia and Luke in Rise of Skywalker. Thus it came as no surprise when Mark Hamill popped up as young Luke at the end of The Mandalorian’s season 2 finale. However, according to Collider, Jon Favreau revealed that Mark Hamill wasn’t only de-aged, but that what fans heard was not his actual voice, either.
Favreau came clean about the truth behind Mark Hamill’s voice on the new Disney+ original series Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, which is an eight-episode documentary that takes the viewer behind the scenes to learn step by step how The Mandalorian came to fruition. Favreau said instead of having Mark Hamill voice young Luke Skywalker, they instead utilized a machine learning technology called Respeecher.
His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesized using an application called Respeecher.
Jon Favreau
One of The Mandalorian’s sound editors, Matthew Wood, went into further detail. He explained that in order to recreate the voice of young Mark Hamill that they fed the application sounds from when he actually was younger. When the machine has been given enough samples, it essentially learned how to sound like Luke Skywalker did in the first three movies and was able to then produce an accurate replica of his voice from that time.
Favreau’s revelation about Mark Hamill’s vocals came just a month after it was revealed that ILM plucked YouTuber, Shamook to work for them after they noticed that he produced a better version of the work they had done to de-age Mark Hamill and put it on his YouTube channel. The video puts Shamooks deepfake side by side the actual scene from The Mandalorian that Luke Skywalker is in, and it is easy to notice the clear differences in the facial features of young Luke. The comparison unequivocally shows Shamook’s work to be much more natural and believable looking than what was initially produced for the show.
While fans will have to wait and see if Mark Hamill will continue to show up on the set of The Mandalorian season 3, they can get a glimpse of him as he was filming the scene with him walking away cradling baby Grogu (baby Yoda) in the new Disney Gallery documentary of the show. According to IMDb, Mark Hamill has also been busy exercising his actual voice across various different projects. He lent his vocal talents for the voice of Skeletor in the Netflix original Masters of Universe: Revelation and Art Rosenbaum in Amazon Prime’s Invincible. He also just wrapped up production on the movie The Machine, where he plays a father whose past comes back to haunt him. And the movie Relatively Super takes an inside look at the private lives of those related to famous superheroes.
