‘The Mandalorian’ Used A Neural Network To Voice Luke Skywalker Instead Of Mark Hamill (Who Was Right There)

So, spoiler alert: Luke Skywalker makes a dramatic entrance in the Season 2 finale of The Mandalorian that absolutely melted Star Wars fans’ minds thanks to the series going to extraordinary lengths to keep the cameo a secret, which was no easy task. Now, Lucasfilm has finally pulled back the curtain on how they pulled off the impressive stunt, which essentially delivered a Return of the Jedi-era Luke Skywalker, despite the over 35-year gap between the classic film and The Mandalorian.

In a new installment of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian released on Wednesday, the behind-the-scenes series focuses exclusively on the Luke cameo. The 40-minute episode is jam-packed with technical information, from commissioning fake concept art to the Deep Fake technology required to de-age Mark Hamill, who was actually on set for the finale. But despite Hamill’s presence, executive producer Jon Favreau revealed that the filmmakers used a very Star Wars-sounding app called “Respeecher” to voice Luke’s dialog, which was especially odd given Hamill is also an accomplished voice actor.

However, according to sound editor Matthew Wood, the creative decision leaned towards accurately recreating Luke’s voice from the ’80s, and Lucasfilm went to great lengths to accomplish that task. Via Collider:

“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.”

If you want to see more of how Lucasfilm painstakingly recreated the Luke Skywalker from your childhood, and somehow kept it a secret in an age of non-stop internet rumors, the new episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian is now streaming on Disney+.