The Book of Boba Fett: How was Luke’s Voice Created? It’s not Mark Hamill. And What it is, is Pretty Crazy!

De-aging technology has been used in high-budget Hollywood films for some time, but Star Wars has taken it to new levels.

Fans were irritated when Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin was replaced for Rogue One by digitally recreating a star who died in 1994. In the most recent chapter of The Book of Boba Fett, the debate is reignited after Luke Skywalker took on a significant supporting role in the series.

Mark Hamill was not involved in the most recent episode of The Book of Boba Fett, “From the Desert Comes a Stranger,” despite allowing Lucasfilm to use his image. This is very different from his actual participation in the season two finale of The Mandalorian.

For The Book of Boba Fett, without Hamill actually playing Luke in the episode, the technique used to create his voice was both intriguing and a bit scary.

In a recent interview with Esquire, Richard Bluff, Director at ILM, discussed how The Book of Boba Fett gave Luke so much dialog without requiring Hamill to be in the recording booth.

“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.”

Another contentious issue among Star Wars fans is that Hamill is one of the most well-known voice actors in the business, thus if ILM could mix together a Frankenstein version of the experienced star from previous recordings, why couldn’t it similarly smooth out his naturally gravely tones into something more comparable to a post-Return of the Jedi vintage?