Mark Hamill made younger in The Mandalorian
(Picture: Lucasfilm)Historically, if a filmmaker wanted to bring back a character in their prime decades later, he or she had three choices: cast a young lookalike, try and de-age the actor with clever makeup and prosthetics, or edit the footage frame by frame.
None of these are perfect solutions. A different actor will naturally always be off, while makeup and prosthetics can never look that good. As for editing footage frame by frame: it’s a painstaking process that’s incredibly time-consuming. It’s only really worth considering for main characters and, even then, it’s not something you’d want to do for extended scenes, given most films contain at least 24 frames for every second of footage.
