How an ‘80s Comedy Allowed the ‘Star Wars’ Franchise to Bring a Famous Character Back From the Dead

Andor, the Star Wars show that doesn’t feature an adorable, breakfast cereal-friendly alien toddler, returns for its second season this week. But the acclaimed series wouldn’t exist without the 2016 prequel Rogue One, which first introduced audiences to Rebel hero Cassian Andor. 

Oddly enough, a key character in that movie was only made possible thanks to a 41-year-old comedy that featured both an underwater bar fight and Academy Award winner Omar Sharif picking up a pile of dog shit: Top Secret!.

Set shortly before the events of the first Star Wars movie, Rogue One opted to bring back the villainous Imperial leader Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing. Instead of simply hiring another actor to play the role, Lucasfilm opted to use state-of-the-art computer technology to recreate the late Cushing’s face on top of another performer’s body, arguably giving Tarkin more of a “taxidermied video game NPC” vibe, and eventually triggering a lawsuit from one of Cushing’s friends and collaborators. 

While the fake Tarkin head was obviously CGI, the visual effects team was able to create this digital replica thanks in large part to a mold of Cushing’s face, which was made in order to pull off just one brief joke in Top Secret!.

Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker’s follow-up to Airplane! cast Cushing as a backwards-talking Swedish bookstore proprietor. When he’s first introduced, the character is seen holding a magnifying glass to his eye, making it appear huge. But when he lowers the magnifying glass, we see that his eye isn’t actually magnified at all, it’s just a bizarrely huge eyeball protruding from his head. 

This terrific sight gag required creating a prosthetic eyeball for Cushing to wear, and that process involved making a lifecast of the actor. This was done by late movie makeup legend Stuart Freeborn, who also worked on Superman, Dr. Strangelove and every installment of the original Star Wars trilogy. 

According to film prop restorer Tom Spina, he acquired a number of items from Freeborn’s collection back in 2004, including the plaster lifecast of Cushing. 

A decade later, Industrial Light & Magic’s John Knoll asked Lucasfilm’s Pablo Hidalgo, a friend of Spina’s, if he knew where they could find a cast of Cushing’s face for their work on Rogue One. “I know just the guy,” Hidalgo responded. So Spina’s company created a resin duplicate of the lifecast for ILM to scan and use, even though they were never informed about the nature of the project. 

In retrospect, it’s pretty funny that the makeup artist who helped create Chewbacca, Yoda and Jabba the Hutt was able to contribute to a new Star Wars movie after his death — but only because he once took a job working for the Kentucky Fried Movie guys.