When Luke Skywalker showed up in The Mandalorian Season 2 finale, reactions were mixed. Some rejoiced when Mark Hamill showed up as a young Luke Skywalker, some questioned mixing the show with the main Skywalker Saga, and many questioned the de-aging technology used to bring us the young Jedi Master. But no matter what, at least we could take solace in knowing it was Hamill's actual voice that was used for young Luke, right? Well, not exactly.
In a new Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian about the making of the Season 2 finale, creator Jon Favreau revealed it was yet another use of technology to replace real actors. "Something people didn't realize is that his voice isn't real," Favreau said during the special episode. "His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesized using an application called Respeecher."
This is particularly surprising given the fact that Hamill has been a rather good and prolific voice actor for a few decades now, and should be more than capable of proving the voice to his own role. As our own Matt Goldberg said, it is like saying "Here's Nolan Ryan...and to pitch for him, a pitching machine."
Supervising sound editor Matthew Wood went on to further 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."
Meanwhile, 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."
Now, we already had a YouTuber provide an arguably better de-aged Luke using deepfake technology than Lucasfilm getting hired by the company, so it's not like they are without flaws, and the Hamill fake voice was good enough that no one questioned it, but should that be celebrated? Earlier this year the Anthony Bourdain documentary director came under attack after admitting they faked Bourdain's voice through an algorithm to provide voice-over narration without making that clear in the film, isn't this the same?
The new Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian episode is now available on Disney+, alongside both seasons of The Mandalorian.
KEEP READING: