Jon Hamm plays Boba Fett? Shut up and take our money, Star Wars
Boba Fett, the most famous bounty hunter in the galaxy, is a man of minimal conversation. He says just 28 words in the original Star Wars trilogy, and one of them is "Aaaargh" as he slides to his 1,000 year-long doom in the Sarlaac pit on Tatooine.
But now the guy in the battered helmet gets to add more words to his total. And even if these words won't be coming from the silver screen, at least he'll be speaking them in the voice of Don Draper, aka Jon Hamm.
Lucasfilm unveiled the lineup of actors for the audiobook of Star Wars: From A Certain Point of View, its anthology of 40 stories celebrating the original Star Wars movie on its 40th birthday. (They're a little late -- the birthday was back in May -- but we'll take it.)
The stories are all set around the edges of that film's timeless story, later renamed A New Hope.
We hadn't previously known one of the stories in the collection was about Boba Fett, but now we do -- and Hamm will voice the bounty hunter. No word on what the story is about, or whether he will be adopting the New Zealand accent of Daniel Logan, who plays young Boba Fett in the prequel trilogy.
We do know Boba Fett is on Tatooine during the events of ANH, since he was retroactively inserted into the film in the 1997 Special Edition. After the prequels, George Lucas redubbed all of Fett's dialogue in Empire Strikes Back to give him a New Zealand accent, putting extra pressure on Hamm to get Antipodean with it.
We also know a possible spin-off movie starring Fett was in the works until director Josh Trank was fired -- so it's likely that this story will not be the last we ever hear about Han Solo's nemesis. But it is your cue to start fantasizing about Hamm taking on the role on screen, too.
Other actors on the star-studded recording include Neil Patrick Harris, playing an imperial officer, and Ashley Eckstein, who played (or plays?) Jedi apprentice Ahsoka Tano in the Clone Wars and Rebels animated series.
We'll have to wait and see whether that means Ahsoka, who was last seen dueling Darth Vader, has officially survived into the timeline of the original movie. That would certainly be a certain point of view on the galaxy-shaking rise of Luke Skywalker.
Topics Star Wars
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
