Photographic Evidence Exists of a Young Luke Skywalker Flashback Filmed for ‘The Force Awakens’

In those early days before The Force Awakens was released, there were rumors all over the map about things that never ended up in the film. There was the one about the movie opening with Luke's hand floating through space, lightsaber still attached, that made us all wince.

Then there was the one that kinda proved to sorta true about Rey having a flashback where she travels to several moments from the past films, ultimately finding herself with a front row seat to the Luke/Vader duel from the end of Empire. That scene happens, but when she ends up in Cloud City, she's in the hallway leading to the fight, not really watching the fight itself—as seen above.

However, the original leak may have been true because this picture surfaced over the weekend...

Back in the day I reported that Robert Boulter was playing young Luke in a Star Wars: The Force Awakens flashback. This picture is going around today. https://t.co/VdFwJO9RD2 pic.twitter.com/QOy2zu1syK

— Jason Ward (@MakingStarWars) November 26, 2018

I imagine they would have digitally replaced this doofus' face with Hamill's in post-production, but the duel apparently got cut from the film altogether. And so much the better, those cgi replacements are becoming super distracting in the Disney Star Wars movies.

It's weird to me that this guy looks more like Hayden Christensen than Hamill. I wonder if they were gonna do some deliberately confusing stuff like Anakin actually dueling Vader in some weird dream sequence type thing. Or maybe I'm just reading way too much into all of this.