Well, pretty much everyone thought it, but now it's officially confimed. Andy Serkis was the voice in the teaser. http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/12/02/andy-serkis-confirms-hes-the-voice-in-the-star-wars-the-force-awakens-trailer
Pretty sure everyone thought it was Cumberbatch But yeah, I'm happy he seems to have gotten such a major role, Andy Serkis is highly underrated as "just" an actor.
Back on the topic of the lightsaber design, is it too much to think that the emitters are made from lightsaber-resistant material? Mandalorian armor, beskar'gam (if you don't know, Boba and Jango wore Mandalorian armor), was made from ore on Mandalore (duh) that completely resisted lightsabers. A lightsaber blade would skid off of the service of beskar. So is it not unreasonable to think that the emitters might be made from beskar or a similar ore?
To add on to this, Vibroblades and Vibroswords were made with an alloy in the blade that is resistance to lightsabers, but that's not canon anymore.
You, mother fucker, must know what it's like to go down the wookiepedia wormhole for 3 hours. I thought I was alone.
Mandalorians are my speciality. Someone get this bad bad reference. Adding to the Mandalorian armor, in Episode III, on-screen we see MagnaGuards fighting the Jedi with their electrostaffs, which don't get cut in half because they're made from phrik, another lightsaber-resistant metal. So that makes another plausible explanation for the material it could be made out of.
Beskar is only mined on Mandalore. Mandalorians are mercenaries. Jango Fett was a Mandalorian. Boba was a Mandalorian. Mandalorians aren't a very cooperative people, and hate outsiders, called aruetiise in the tongue of Mando'a. Phrik is extremely rare and expensive. MagnaGuards weren't very commonly deployed by the CIS. Side note: In the EU, Palpatine's lightsaber is said to be made of phrik.
http://www.mandoa.org/ My life. And my Mando'a dictionary. Missed this. Vibro-weapons are definitely canon still, because the BX commando droids of the Clone Wars series wielded vibroswords, and Aurra Sing had vibroblades in her appearances. People take that series for granted, but now that everything EU has been de-canonized, it saves a lot of things from sharing the same fate by their appearance in the series.
My areas of expertise are Mandalorian culture (which is somewhat non-canon in some respects), the Galactic Civil War (which also has a lot of non-canon stuff), and the Clone Wars. The Old Republic is out of my area, so is the New Republic. I can rant about the other three though. Back to the trailer. Some things I really appreciated were the black guy stormtrooper, which essentially just reestablished that the Empire recruited some of the stormtroopers, and that only a fraction were clone troopers, which was de-canonized. This makes it all the more plausible for stormtroopers in Episodes 4-6 to not to have Temuera Morrison's voice, because they weren't clones. It also gives a little leeway to their clumsiness, because if they were clones they were supposed to be superior. I believe something has been rumored that there's something along the lines there being some daughter of Han Solo (and presumably Leia Solo) that plays a role, being the one we saw on the desert planet (which may or not be Tatooine, it could always be a planet like Saleucami, i.e. the planet where the Jedi gets shot on the speeder bike in Episode 3).
Three more names have been added to the cast list that we were previously unaware of. This movie now has my full attention. http://www.imdb.com/news/ni58147881/