Cameo alert! Many stars — including the likes of Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Natalie Portman and Adam Driver — have explored a galaxy far, far away in various Star Wars films or TV series. However, the main intergalactic adventurers are not the only stars that the sci-fi franchise has seen.
Across its original movies and newer Disney+ series, even more celebrities have been acted in blink-and-you-missed-it surprise cameos, including Prince William, Prince Harry, Rosario Dawson and Daniel Craig.
The Duke of Cambridge and the Duke of Sussex, for their part, both secretly filmed a brief scene in Star Wars: The Last Jedi as stormtroopers. While the scene was ultimately cut ahead of the movie’s theatrical release, the clip later made headlines in an extended cut years later.
“They were very nice: Prince William was funny, and Harry as well,” Benicio del Toro, who played a hacker Last Jedi, told Radio Times in December 2017 of his set experiences with the royal brothers. “I think they were very nice. I don’t know how to explain it, but they were very normal. Which is very nice.”
Meanwhile, fans were thrilled by Dawson’s casting after learning that she would bring the animated character of Ahsoka Tano to life on Disney+’s The Mandalorian.
“People have been fan-casting me on all kinds of things, like She-Hulk and stuff. And I always just think it’s really fun because I get to see myself in different kinds of art,” Dawson recalled during a November 2020 Vanity Fair interview. “But then I got a FaceTime call from Jon Favreau and Dave [Filoni]. They were building out The Mandalorian, and I got to have a behind-the-scenes look at visuals and concept [from] what they were planning on doing with this second season. They were just about to drop the first one, and they had all of this art that had me as Ahsoka. They had already been preparing, knowing that they wanted to have her be a part of a story in the second season. They’d just been visualizing me in this role that whole time, and it was mind-boggling.”
The Dopesick actress continued at the time, gushing over the role: “I was pacing and jumping up and down, trying to keep really cool in my voice, but I was freaking out. I mean, this is real Star Wars — the font, the look, the art, the everything, and my face in there. I just, I couldn’t. I was beside myself, and they were asking, ‘Do you want to do this? I mean, we appreciate if it’s not something you want to do.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, no, no, that would be cool, actually. I think we could maybe work this out.’”
While many of these celebrity cameos have been fun and light-hearted, a posthumous appearance by Fisher in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker added a somber touch.
“To be in her final acting [project], in this movie or be it via unused footage, [it] was very emotional to see,” Richard E. Grant, who costarred in the film, exclusively told Us Weekly in December 2019. “It’s been seamlessly done. You wouldn’t know that it hadn’t been shot specifically for this movie.”
Keep scrolling to revisit which stars have made quick appearances throughout the Star Wars franchise: