The Mandalorian co-creator Jon Favreau has revealed that the shocking Luke Skywalker cameo in the season two finale wasn’t voiced by Mark Hamill despite the actor being a well-renowned voice actor.
In a new Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian about the making of the Season two finale, Favreau revealed that the cameo was yet another use of technology to replace real actors. “Something people didn’t realize is that his voice isn’t real. His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesized using an application called Respeecher.”
Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood continued to explain how the technology works, and how they spliced together old sound footage to simulate a young Hamill.
“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.”
SEE ALSO: Mark Hamill is back as Luke Skywalker in clip and images from Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian
Executive producer Dave Filoni added: “The computer is sampling sounds and tones from younger Mark Hamill, and creating a performance that sounds like that Luke Skywalker.”
It seems like Lucasfilm may be doubling down on using this technology for future projects since the studio has previously confirmed that they hired a YouTuber named Shamook who is best known for using deepfake technology to improve upon the aforementioned Luke Skywalker cameo.
The latest Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian episodes as well as both seasons of The Mandalorian are now available to stream on Disney+.
