No, Dustin Hoffman Wasn’t In Star Wars

It is is Dustin Hoffman‘s 86th birthday immediately, and as his title started to development on social media (fueled, little doubt, by customers questioning why Dustin Hoffman is all of the sudden trending) a resurfaced TikTok video has surprised and delighted tens of 1000’s by revealing that The Graduate and Rain Man star had a secret cameo as a Loss of life Star guard in 1977’s unique Star Wars.

Solely … it is a whole fabrication, debunked by doing only a second of precise analysis.

The “discovery” might have began as a deliberate hoax. The video in query originated on Could 18, 2022, and was posted by the TikTok account BrianMonarchComedy. Monarch payments himself as a “rise up comic and deepfaker,” and his account is stuffed with movies of well-known film scenes which have been doctored in unusual and amusing option to embody alternate actors. Think about the “I am going to have what she’s having” orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally, as an illustration, with Sylvester Stallone within the Billy Crystal position and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Meg Ryan. (Monarch has!)

Monarch seems to have deployed the identical know-how in his Star Wars video, altering the looks of Ron Conrad, lengthy confirmed because the precise actor taking part in the Loss of life Star guard in query, to extra intently resemble Hoffman.

Here’s a closeup of Conrad from that shot, in contrast with the doctored picture Monarch offered displaying Hoffman. (Monarch provides to the impact by protecting his clip from Star Wars as a picture-in-picture and comparatively small and blurry in his TikTok video.)

Cheers to Monarch for internet hosting a intelligent account that clearly takes a good quantity of labor, substituting unlikely actors in iconic film scenes. However the phenomenon of credulous Twitter customers embracing apparent bullshit with bulletproof certainty is an embarrassing development that deserves, on the very least, a judgmental head shake.