Luke Skywalker Speaks
Mark Hamill has always embraced his “Star Wars” legacy, but when he was invited back
for “The Force Awakens” and “The Last Jedi,” he hesitated: “I was just really scared.”
By DAVE ITZKOFF OCT. 30, 2017
MALIBU, Calif. — It was maybe the longest buildup in movie history.
After more than three decades since he was last onscreen, years of anticipation and some two hours into “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” there was Luke Skywalker, the once youthful hero of this science-fiction 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, tantalizing preface to the next “Star Wars” sequel, “The Last Jedi,” which opens Dec. 15 — imagine how it felt for Mark Hamill.
Since 1977, when the original “Star Wars” went supernova and started a multibillion-dollar franchise, Mr. 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 Mr. Hamill came to accept — eventually — as a gift to him and his character.
“It is, if you can be objective about it,” he said a few weeks ago, sitting in his home here near the Pacific Ocean.
Mr. Hamill at home in Malibu with the family dog, Millie. Credit Ture Lillegraven for The New York Times
Finding that inner peace took Mr. 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 Mr. 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 theater roles; the franchise went into periods of hibernation, then came roaring back and restored him to relevance when he least expected it.
But Mr. 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 gray beard, beneath which lurks a mischievous sense of humor, 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 said 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 October afternoon, he was at home with his wife, Marilou, and their daughter, Chelsea; the couple also has 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, Mr. Hamill’s own cultural obsession, though you might spot a photo of the 2-year-old Nathan frolicking with Yoda on the set of “Return of the Jedi.”
Mr. Hamill is not unduly nostalgic, but he conducts himself with an impish refusal to grow up. In conversation, he will sometimes stretch on the floor in yoga poses; he’ll slip into the exaggerated voices of famous colleagues — the adenoidal clip of the “Star Wars” creator George Lucas or the disaffected monotone of Mr. Ford.
In many ways, he is still the boy who was fascinated with cartoon voice actors, musical theater, stage magicians and ventriloquists, and whose favorite film was “King Kong.”
Proudly recalling a fight scene from “Return of the Jedi,” Mr. Hamill said, “For me, sitting in the rancor’s hand, I was going all Fay Wray — it’s like a major accomplishment to me. But it was always that way. I’d say ‘Hey, you guys, my face is on the back of a box of C-3PO’s cereal!’”
Mr. Hamill will sometimes stretch in yoga poses or do imitations of George Lucas and Harrison Ford. Credit Ture Lillegraven for The New York Times
The son of a Navy officer, Mr. Hamill was the middle child of seven siblings. He had an itinerant upbringing, living in California, Virginia and Japan, attending nine schools in 12 years and perpetually feeling like the new kid.
When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1969, Mr. Hamill was interested in acting, but really wanted to be involved in show business however he could. “If I didn’t get a part, no problem,” he said. “Then where do I go? I sell tickets. I make props. I make posters. I don’t have to be in the show – I want to be near the show.”
He landed early roles on “General Hospital” and “The Partridge Family.” And then, of course, came “Star Wars”: a strange screenplay, still in flux when he read it, with sentient robots, laser swords and a supernatural spirituality bound up in a fable about good and evil.
Mr. Lucas said he chose Mr. 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,” Mr. Lucas said. He added that Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Hamill to his character and to Ms. Fisher and Mr. 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 Mr. Ford had performed “adequately,” Mr. Hamill “uninspiredly” and Ms. Fisher “wretchedly,” Mr. Hamill said, “We had T-shirts made: ‘adequate, uninspired and wretched.’ I said, ‘Harrison, adequate’s practically a rave compared to what we got.’”
Above, the original threesome: Mark Hamill, left, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford. Below, the three stars reuniting in 2015. “The number of onscreen days that I spent with Mark were very, very few,” Harrison Ford said. “I knew Chewbacca better.” Credit Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox
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