Fans of the Star Wars franchise were truly beside themselves when The Mandalorian season two finale showed Luke Skywalker saving the day once again. The hero, who had not been seen canonically seen Return of the Jedi, swooped in at the last moment to destroy the villainous robots attacking Baby Yoda (Grogu) and take him away to learn how to become a Jedi. It was later revealed that this young version of Skywalker was actually played by Mark Hamill – but the Jedi originally planned to help Din Djarin was a silent hero from The Phantom Menace.

In 1999 Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace introduced a collection of new Jedi Knights, including Mace Windu, Qui-Gon Jin and Ki-Adi-Mundi.

Included in this line-up was the alien hero Plo Koon.

Jedi Master Plo Koon was placed in the script where Skywalker was supposed to arrive in an attempt to prevent any leaks.

This information was revealed by Hamill and Jon Favreau on Disney Plus show Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian.

The Plo Koon misdirect meant that all of The Mandalorian’s staff had no idea about Hamill or Skywalker’s return.

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Plo Koon was an extremely convincing lie as Star Wars boss Dave Filoni has publicly revealed how the Kel Dor Jedi Master is his “favourite” from the mythos.

To add to the scheme, Plo Koon was even drawn up in concept art to make it seem like Skywalker was nowhere near The Mandalorian’s production.

Hamill also spoke about returning to the character after previously appearing in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.

He said: “When they went from the original trilogy to the sequels, obviously there is a huge gap in time where there are these untold stories, but I just assumed they’d get an age-appropriate actor.”

Favreau explained: “When you have those feelings, where it feels really compelling, you know that you’re onto something.

“We knew that if we could pull this off it would represent so much to so many people. Especially to Mark, it will let him come in there and show Luke at this moment and let it be a celebration, and also a culmination of the two-season arc about the journey of this little child.”

The documentary episode also revealed Hamill did not even voice his own character.

Instead, Disney used a synthetic version of his voice to tell the story.

Favreau explained: “So I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR [Automated Dialogue Replacement] 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.”

The Star Wars saga and The Mandalorian are available on Disney Plus now.