Disney's D23 expo can make it feel like Christmas came early to those interested in some of the world's most popular franchises, and if D23 is Christmas, then the seemingly endless supply of news, casting announcements, trailer reveals, pictures, and release dates are the presents waiting under the tree. Star Wars fans must have been on Santa's nice list this year, because they were treated to lots of awesome news, most notably:
-
Ewan McGregor starring in an Obi-Wan Kenobi series.
-
A new Star Wars resort is coming.
-
A poster for Rise of Skywalker.
-
New trailers for The Mandalorian and Rise of Skywalker.
The poster for Episode 9 has become a major topic of discussion for one reason... Palpatine looks weird.
After first seeing the poster, a conversation between a friend and myself lead to the realization that Palpatine looks strange, because for the first time in live action, he is not being played by Ian Mcdiarmid, but is in fact actually being played by Matt Smith. It was a very quick realization. I said Palpatine looked weird, my friend Tyler responded that he thinks Palpatine looked like a cartoon, then I said he looked more like a bad 3D render, to which Tyler replied that he looks like Matt Smith wearing a ton of make-up.
For those of you who haven't kept up with all the Star Wars rumors, it has long been rumored that Matt Smith would play the Emperor in Episode 9, though his involvement is continually denied. For the record, Disney denied an Obi-Wan series was being made for a long time until finally announcing it at D23.
I started to search the internet for pictures of Matt Smith facing the camera in the same orientation as Palpatine is on the poster. This was actually harder than expected. The picture of Palpatine was taken with the camera lined up at face level, directly centered with his face, and Palpatines head angled down slightly. Matt Smith is 6 feet tall, so there are not many pictures where the camera is the same height as his face, and when there are, most of the time he is not looking the camera dead on and more of his profile is in the picture. The most similar image of Matt Smith that I wound up finding was this one.
Even in the above image, the camera is lower than Smith's head, his left side is slightly more revealed to the camera, and his head is a bit tilted to the side. But this was the best oriented photo I could find, that wasn't low resoultion, so it had to work.
I did some minor editing to rotate his face and skew it more towards the correct camera perspective. Then I overlayed the image of Smith on top of the image of Palpatine from the poster, turned the visibility down and was shocked by how perfect everything lined up.
The match is nearly perfect. Are you excited to see Matt Smith play the Palpatine? Do you think he is playing a different character who simply gets possessed by Palpatine? Let's hear your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.