Boba Fett is about to make his return to a galaxy far, far away in very handsome fashion. Mad Men and Baby Driver star Jon Hamm has been tapped to voice the legendary bounty hunter in a brand new Star Wars story. Hamm is lending his talents for the audiobook version of Star Wars: A Certain Point of View, which includes 40 short stories from the Star Wars universe.
The news was revealed by StarWars.com ahead of the release of Star Wars: A Certain Point of View, which is set to arrive on October 3. An all-star cast was assembled for the audiobook, but easily the most notable is the reveal that Jon Hamm is voicing Boba Fett in a short titled Added Muscle, which was written from Fett's perspective by Paul Dini of Batman: The Animated Series fame. One of the book's producers, Alan Blank, had this to say about the upcoming Star Wars audiobook.
"This was a fun opportunity to do a full-cast Star Wars audiobook, which we've only been able to truly do thus far with Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars audiobooks because they're written as plays. We got lucky this time in From A Certain Point of View with all the multiple first person points of view. In addition to multiple perspectives, short stories mean a small time commitment in the recording studio, and that enabled us to pursue some big names! We know some of these readers, like Jon Hamm (reading as Boba Fett) and Neil Patrick Harris (reading about an Imperial officer in the Death Star), might not be available for an entire audiobook, but we were able to bring them on board for this project."
In addition to Jon Hamm as Boba Fett, the voice cast for the Star Wars: A Certain Point of View audiobook includes Jonathan Davis, Ashley Eckstein, Janina Gavankar, Neil Patrick Harris, January LaVoy, Saskia Maarleveld, Carol Monda, Daniel José Older and Marc Thompson. Star Wars fans will recognize names like Ashley Eckstein as Ahsoka Tano from Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Janina Gavankar from the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront II. It sounds like Lucasfilm pulled no punches for this new Star Wars book, which is intended to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the franchise.
As for Boba Fett, fans have been clamoring for more of the bounty hunter ever since Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012. Josh Trank (Fantastic Four) got very close to making a Boba Fett movie a couple of years ago, but he parted ways with Lucasfilm before the project really got going. There are still rumors that the studio is developing a bounty hunter movie that will heavily feature Boba Fett, but it hasn't yet been confirmed. For now, we have a great actor in the form of Jon Hamm playing the character in what could be a very cool addition to the Star Wars universe.