The king of cameos has returned to lend his hand to another movie in need.
As soon as the trailer for the upcoming Star Wars film, The Mandalorian and Grogu, dropped on Tuesday, fans were abuzz with speculation that Martin Scorsese made a surprise appearance—based solely on his voice.
The acclaimed director, 83, was first speculated by fans to appear in the film as an alien monkey operating a food stand whom the titular Mandalorian, played by Pedro Pascal, pays for information.
While the director’s full involvement in the forthcoming 2026 Star Wars film has not yet been revealed, Lucasfilm confirmed on Tuesday that it was indeed the legendary director’s voice.
If it wasn’t Scorsese’s iconic voice that tipped fans off, surely the alien’s overtly referential bushy eyebrows would’ve done the trick.
In the clip, Pascal’s Mandalorian flips a coin to the shopkeeper and says he needs information.
“Whoa. For that price, I’ll tell you whatever you want,” Scorsese, as the CGI space monkey, replies.
When the Mandalorian tells him who he needs information about, Scorsese’s alien goes into a panic and shuts his shop down upon hearing the name.
“Closed for the night. Thank you!” he concludes hastily, dropping the shop window’s shutters.
The project will be the second collaboration between the film’s director, Jon Favreau, and Scorsese. Favreau, 59, made an appearance in Scorsese’s 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street as a securities lawyer. It would seem that Scorsese is repaying the favor a decade later.
Fans of Scorsese are no strangers to the director’s surprise cameos in films. Since his first film in 1967, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Scorsese has appeared in nearly every single one of his 26 films.
Some of them are blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quick, like his brief appearance as a street thug in his directorial debut, and others are full-blown characters like his perverse backseat passenger in his Oscar-winning 1976 film Taxi Driver.
Scorsese is also known to lend his voice to films, both those he directed and other projects in which he has no involvement. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese gets suckered into a bad over-the-phone stock deal by Leonardo DiCaprio, and in the 2009 Nicolas Cage film Bringing Out the Dead, Scorsese appears in a voice-only role as an ambulance dispatcher.
Even in his mid-80s, the Oscar winner shows no signs of slowing down. Despite Apple TV releasing a career retrospective documentary on him in October, the director is going full steam ahead.
He is reportedly directing a new DiCaprio-starring film, based on the 2023 ghost story, What Happens at Night, written by Peter Cameron. The director’s first film since his Oscar-winning 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon (in which he also makes a cameo) has not yet set a release date, but will begin filming later this year.
Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu will be released in theaters on May 22 before it streams on Disney+.
