Rosario Dawson (Ahsoka) didn’t know she was acting with Luke Skywalker

Ever since the season 2 finale of The Mandalorian came along and introduced us to a digitally de-aged version of Star Wars icon Luke Skywalker, we knew we were going to see the character again. That second meeting came in The Book of Boba Fett, when Mandalorian Din Djarin goes in search of his pal Baby Yoda only to find the little guy training with Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano (Rosario Dawson).

While it was a bit of a detour for a show supposedly about Boba Fett, it ended up being one of the most memorable and talked-about episodes of the series, due in large part to the show’s depiction of Luke. After the digital Luke’s first appearance in The Mandalorian, deepfake artist Shamook posted a video to YouTube showing how he would have fixed the CGI for Luke in that show. Disney went ahead and hired him based off that, and the result is pretty undeniable. The Book of Boba Fett’s Luke Skywalker was a huge leap forward from the previous show.

Unsurprisingly, Luke’s appearance in The Book of Boba Fett was one of those things that Disney and Lucasfilm kept top secret during production. Even Ahsoka actor Rosario Dawson had no idea it was coming until she showed up to film those scenes.

Rosario Dawson didn’t know she was filming scenes with Luke Skywalker in The Book of Boba Fett

Yes, as it turns out, Dawson was unaware that the scenes she was scheduled to film during The Book of Boba Fett’s sixth episode were with Luke Skywalker until she actually showed up to shoot them. This came out recently on Twitter, when Dawson responded to a fan who asked about whether she was nerding out over getting to shoot such an important moment asLuke and Ahsoka sharing their first live-action scenes together. “Are you kidding?! I was freaking out. I’m still pinching myself that I got to work with MARK HAMILL as AHSOKA. I didn’t know my scene was with LUKE till day of…!” Dawson said.

Ever the class-act, Hamill chimed in a few days later to say that it had been his pleasure to work with Dawson.

Not only is this whole thing interesting just for the fact that Dawson had no idea she would be working with Hamill or shooting scenes with Luke in advance, but also because it gives us a bit more of an idea about Hamill’s actual involvement with The Book of Boba Fett. This is something that there’s been a bit of confusion over, since Hamill himself did not actually appear in the show. Instead, Luke was portrayed by actor Graham Hamilton, and then the digital deepfake was applied to Hamilton’s face in post-production.

Shortly after the episode aired, Hamilton shared a post to Instagram highlighting some of his favorite moments from The Book of Boba Fett shoot, including “listening to all of Mark’s incredible stories.” From the sounds of things, Hamill was on set, presumably serving in an advisory role to give insights into the character he’s made so iconic over the years. Pretty cool.

How Luke Skywalker’s voice was digitally recreated

Similarly, Hamill did not record any new dialogue for The Book of Boba Fett. Instead, Ukranian company Respeecher created a digital version of Hamill’s voice that allowed Lucasfilm to have the character say whatever dialogue they needed. They did this same thing with The Mandalorian’s season 2 finale, and seemingly perfected things even more for The Book of Boba Fett.

The largest challenge that the team at Respeecher faced in creating a digital “skin” of Hamill’s voice was finding good enough records to base it on. “We heard recordings from 30 to 40 years ago, and those recordings were not good,” Respeecher co-founder Alex Serdiuk explained to Variety. After hearing those initial recordings, the engineers at Respeecher scoured audio archives, turning up ADR recordings, video game voiceovers, and audiobook narrations that Hamill had done during the time period of his life that they were looking to mimic.

“Our technology applies a digital voice skin, digital vocal apparatus of that particular performance, and that gives content creators and moviemakers that full content over how it should sound and even inflections,” Serdiuk said.

The process of loading all the voice data in to “train a model” took the company around two weeks. After that, all that data was compiled to make a new voice. Respeecher has the ability to make all sorts of tweaks during this process, enabling them to meet a large range of production needs, including adjusting things like the voice’s inflection.

In this case, those needs were making a believable voice for Luke Skywalker in the post-Return of the Jedi era, and I’d say they succeeded.

The Book of Boba Fett is available to stream on Disney+. Now that Disney and Lucasfilm are perfecting their digital recreation game for Luke and have a bajillion other Star Wars shows in the works, who knows when we might see him turn up next.

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h/t GameRant, Bleeding Cool