Luke Skywalker’s return to Star Wars in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett generated an enormous amount of discussion on the future of movie-making. This Luke combined a new performance from Mark Hamill, deepfake technology, and ReSpeecher software to bring back the post-Return of the Jedi version of the character.
Reactions at the time ranged from fears that this tech will put actors out of a job, those just excited to see a familiar face back in action, and some that just couldn’t get beyond the ‘uncanny valley’ of the artificial character. However, the tech had visibly improved even between The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, so we should expect future appearances to look even better.
But should these even happen? Fans on r/StarWars are torn, though most concede we’re likely to see more Luke in The Mandalorian‘s third season or in Ahsoka.
As before, there’s one camp saying they’re hyped for the VFX tech and are confident it’ll improve in leaps and bounds over the next few years. Others simply wish they’d recast (once again Sebastian Stan’s name is being mentioned) and that they should “get a real actor who can portray real emotions and speak in more than fortune cookie sayings” and that the CGI used “neuters” the expressiveness of Luke’s character.
Now that the cork is popped, we should expect to see many more legacy characters returning from the original trilogy using this method – perhaps even eventually shows primarily populated by deepfaked heroes. Han Solo’s adventures after Return of the Jedi, anyone?
