Sky’s the limit
Mark Hamill took a lot of persuading to revisit Luke Skywalker – a character that brought him fame, fortune and stereotyping – in the new Star Wars franchise, only to find he was reduced to a cameo in The Force Awakens. The new adventure, The Last Jedi pu
Mark Hamill on the Star Wars legacy, the long buildup to his return and life without Carrie Fisher
It was maybe the longest build-up in movie history. After more than three decades since he was last on screen, years of anticipation and some two hours into Star Wars: The Force Awakens, there was Luke Skywalker, the once youthful hero of this sciencefiction saga, revealed as a weathered elder. Standing at a cliff with a solemn look on his face, he was about to receive his lightsaber from Rey, the young heroine, when the story ended and the credits rolled. Luke never said a word.
If this was a bittersweet moment for fans – an abrupt, tantalising preface to the next Star Wars sequel, The Last Jedi, which opens next Friday – imagine how it felt for Mark Hamill.
Since 1977, when the original Star Wars went supernova and started a multibillion-pound franchise, Hamill has been synonymous with Luke Skywalker, the desert-dwelling tenderfoot who destroys the Death Star, becomes a Jedi knight and reconciles with his villainous father, Darth Vader.
In 2015, The Force Awakens found more substantial screen time for the senior incarnations of Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford). But Luke was withheld for maximum anticipation, a decision that Hamill came to accept – eventually – as a gift to him and his character.
“It is, if you can be objective about it,” he says, sitting in his Malibu home in California near the Pacific Ocean.
Finding that inner peace took Hamill several months of frustration and self-pity – not to mention a Lucasfilm-mandated regimen of dieting and exercise, during which he thought to himself: “Why are they training me to turn and remove a hood? I could be the size of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, who’s going to know?”
You would understand if Hamill, now 66, had a conflicted relationship with Star Wars, which put him on a pop-cultural pedestal. The series defined and dominated his career, even as he took on other film, television and theatre roles; the franchise went into periods of hibernation, then came roaring back and restored him to relevance when he least expected it.
But Hamill isn’t bitter or jaded, and he isn’t Luke, though he has retained some of that character’s incorruptibility. He’s gone from a new hope to an old hand, with a lined, expressive face and a grey beard, beneath which lurks a mischievous sense of humour, a yearning to perform and a joy in sharing Star Wars war stories.
At heart, he is as much of an unapologetic geek as any of his admirers, as astonished by the circumstances that brought Star Wars into his life as he is grateful that he gets to return to its galaxy of long ago and far, far away.
“I’m such a fraud,” he says with a theatrical air. “But I’m enjoying all the residual attention that the movie’s getting. I should be, by all rights, puttering in my garden with a metal detector, telling kids to get off my lawn. What’s not to love?”
On this afternoon he is at home with his wife, Marilou, and their daughter, Chelsea; the couple also have two sons, Nathan and Griffin. The spacious dwelling is hardly a shrine to Star Wars – it’s mostly decorated with artwork of cherubs and the Beatles, Hamill’s own cultural obsession, though you might spot a photo of the two-year-old Nathan frolicking with Yoda on the set of Return of the Jedi.
Lucas says he chose Hamill from a pool of young actors because he brought a measure of humanity to a film full of space vehicles and special effects. “I needed a protagonist who was comfortable treating these things both casually and seriously in order to give that world an air of authenticity,” Lucas says. He adds that Hamill “brought a boyish enthusiasm and exuberance that really defined the character,” and that “made Luke accessible and relatable to people in the first Star Wars ”and its sequels.
Hamill committed fully to the material, but was unsure it would find a wider audience. “I thought, even if this thing doesn’t slay at the box office, it’s got midnight cult movie written all over it,” he said. “Move over, Rocky Horror, Star Wars is here!”
Instead, Star Wars became an international phenomenon, tying Hamill to his character and to Fisher and Ford – even now, he sometimes accidentally calls them “Harry and Carrison” – as they promoted the movie together.
When the critic John Simon wrote in New York magazine that Ford had performed “adequately,” Hamill “uninspiredly” and Fisher “wretchedly,” Hamill says, “We had T-shirts made: ‘adequate, uninspired and wretched.’ I said, ‘Harrison, adequate’s practically a rave compared to what we got.’”
Ford said that during this time, “the three of us were like a very small tribe in the wilderness. We really were figuring this out as we went along.” Hamill struck him as “a very bright,