We finally know the identity of the mysterious Force ghost that briefly haunts Anakin Skywalker’s back in the lava-filled showdown at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
If you’ve watched Revenge of the Sith without ever noticing this guy, don’t worry. He appears in frame for just a split second and is really only visible if you’re watching in slow motion or going frame-by-frame. But he’s still there, a face frozen in time, peeking right over Anakin’s shoulder.
Apparently, people have been talking about this guy since 2015, but in 2024, the mystery popped up on Reddit again — prompting one Industrial Light and Magic veteran to dive into the mystery. Todd Vaziri, who worked on Revenge of the Sith as a compositor, decided to dive into archival footage — not an easy task, considering the archival footage had been moved off the servers years ago.
“I think it took 24 hours to unearth the footage and put it back on our servers. I was so excited, my heart was pounding out of my chest. No one had seen the original greenscreen footage for nearly twenty years,” Vaziri told Ian Kintzle for the Star Wars Celebration 2025 program. “The problem was I didn’t remember exactly what these plates looked like, both because it wasn’t my shot, and it was two decades prior. So I dug, and I dug, and finally I found the plate photography. I couldn’t believe it. There, on-set, was a man — likely a stunt rigger — wearing not a robe, but a peculiar shirt that resembled one, standing behind Hayden, manually puppeteering the greenscreen lava skiff that he and Ewan were fighting on. His face and the ‘Force ghost’ matched up frame-for-frame.”
While this moment might technically count as a “mistake,” it’s also the result of some pure movie magic that shows how much hard, practical work went into the prequels. As Vaziri told Kintzle, “Nobody that was part of this process ever caught [the guy] and that’s how it made it in the movie. But in a way, I think it’s really wonderful. Plenty of my shots have mistakes in them, and as the saying goes: perfect is the enemy of good. We want our shots to be as perfect as they can be, but we can’t hit everything. In the last 20 years, we have evolved what we call the “Final Check” process, which is our way of scrutinizing shots before they leave ILM. An extra step of quality control, if you will. The bottom line is that we put human hands on every single one of the thousands of shots that you see in Star Wars. This world is handmade, and little things like this become part of ILM history.”
