Mark Hamill for the second time reprised his role as Luke Skywalker for Disney+, this time on the show Boba Fett.

But while he’s credited in the role, that’s more of curtesy versus what this was.

A body double was used of a younger person.
His face was de-aged noticeably.
His voice was 100% computer generated.

The result was something that doesn’t really look real, but doesn’t look bad.

And this is the third time they’ve done it.

The first two times were in 2016, with Star Wars Rogue One, where they had a Carrie Fisher cameo at the end and more noticeably they brought Peter Cushing back as Grand Moff Tarkin, despite the actor dying 20+ years prior.

This effect was done on a 200 million dollar movie and now 5-6 years later, Hamill on a noticeably lower budget show looks better.

So this brings in the question of why cast actors?

Solo came out in 2017 with Alden Ehrenreich taking the role of Han Solo from Harrison Ford.

The movie failed, losing 100 million dollars and while it wasn’t fantastic, it wasn’t bad.

A lot of reasons contributed to the failure, but one reason was people complained the lead actor didn’t look like Harrison Ford.

This makes a really strange case that for a lot of movies and shows going forward, instead of worrying about recasting, just buy the rights to a persons image and keep them alive forever.

Which enters into some dangerous legal territory where studios could in theory style a CGI character off an actor and be able to do it.

Still probably a decade out from this, but I’d not be shocked if something like a Godfather series came out, recreating the original cast and making that a thing.