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Mark Hamill Talks To StarWars.com About The Role That Made Him An Icon

Posted by Dustin on September 25, 2017 at 09:07 PM CST


From StarWars.com:

THE LAST JEDI SPEAKS

MARK HAMILL TALKS TO STARWARS.COM ABOUT THE ROLE THAT MADE HIM AN ICON AND HIS RETURN AS LUKE SKYWALKER IN STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.


Mark Hamill needs little introduction. As Luke Skywalker, he was the heart of the original Star Wars trilogy, making us laugh, cry, and cheer as he depicted a hero’s journey from boy to man. His range in the films is impressive: playing the straight man to a couple of anxious robots; acting as an impatient student opposite a small, strange, green puppet; emerging as a confident, powerful warrior who must save his father’s soul. He made us believe in it all, and Star Wars would not be Star Wars without Hamill’s gifts. (He’s also a supremely talented voice actor, and is the Joker for a generation of Batman fans.)

This has been a big year for Hamill. He was named a Disney Legend and GQ’s Icon of the Year. His turn in the critically-acclaimed Brigsby Bear garnered raves, and he even made a memorable cameo in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 reboot as P.T. Mindslap, a shady space-circus ringmaster. Plus, he has a new movie coming out in December, which you might have heard about. In celebration of the Star Wars icon’s birthday today, StarWars.com spoke to Hamill about his early inspirations for acting, going to dinner with Sir Alec Guinness, and putting on Jedi robes again for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

StarWars.com: I’d like to start off with an easy question. Luke is both Rey’s father and Snoke, correct?

Mark Hamill: [Laughs] Wow, you are good at lobbing me softballs. It’s really weird, because they sent us already to London and Berlin on a press junket. And I’m saying to my wife, “It’s really odd going out to do press for a movie that you’re not supposed to talk about. What are we going to talk about? The weather?” But everybody was really nice. And you know, I can talk about everything from Episode I through Rogue One and Force Awakens, but I just really can’t talk about Last Jedi in detail.

StarWars.com: All right. I’ll give you a pass on that one.

Mark Hamill: Thanks, what a kind man you are.

StarWars.com: So to go way back, when did you first know you wanted to be an actor?

Mark Hamill: You know, that’s a really interesting question. I didn’t know specifically that I wanted to be an actor, but from my earliest memories I loved the comic strips that were in the newspapers that were delivered to my door. They made me want to read, and I fancied myself a cartoonist. I tried drawing, I idolized Charles Schultz. Then, when I was like five or six, I saw Clarence Nash doing Donald Duck. I had never thought about the human actors behind the voices of cartoon characters. A light bulb went off in my head. As I said when I accepted the Disney award, Walt Disney was one of the few studios that would draw back the curtain of secrecy and show you how movies were made. Now, I was a mad movie fan. The black-and-white King Kong I just loved as a kid. I read Famous Monsters and learned about stop-frame animation and so forth. So when I saw there’s the camera crew, there’s the construction people who build the sets, there’s wardrobe, gosh, there’s even caterers, I thought, “If I can’t be in the show, at least I can be near the show.” Now, I’m the middle of seven children, so I’m not going to admit that I want to be in show business because I’d get teased and ridiculed. But I knew all along that that’s the business I wanted to be in.

Any chance I got to be on stage [I took]. I hosted a variety show with my ventriloquist dummy in fifth grade. I’m telling you, it’s just an unbelievable feeling to get laughs. With a dummy, you can insult people and blame it all on the dummy. “That’s a terrible thing to say!”

I didn’t know anybody in show business. I didn’t know anybody who knew anybody in show business. You go to New York and try and get on the stage or go to Los Angeles trying to get into television and movies. I graduated high school in Yokohama, Japan. My dad was in the Navy. So coming back, I stopped in Los Angeles for my older brother’s wedding and wound up [pursuing acting].

Sometimes I think I got it backwards, because normally you start on the stage and then you branch out, come west and do television, or even television back in New York. But I didn’t do Broadway until after I had done Star Wars. I wound up replacing in Amadeus. I did the national tour and then they moved me to Broadway. I’ve been on Broadway, I don’t know, half a dozen, maybe seven times. Off-Broadway once. I did regional theater and, of course, the national tour. There’s nothing like a live audience because you get the immediate feedback.

On something like The Last Jedi, it’s such a massive production. The complexity of it is just mind-boggling to me, and how [director] Rian Johnson stays so even-tempered and amiable. I never saw him lose his temper, I never heard him curse or humiliate someone. You know, I’ve had directors that dress people down in front of the whole crew. I was so lucky to be able to have his guidance. Everyone says, “Oh, it must be so fun coming back to Star Wars.” Yeah, it’s fun but it’s also hugely intimidating and bordering on terrifying, because it’s just almost too high profile for comfort. Brigsby Bear is a little film about little people with big ideas. It’s set in the suburbs. I mean, you can relate to it. With something like this, it’s just a massive fantasy film.

I was on one set, and I’m not giving anything away because Rian has already talked about a casino sequence. The set, with 150 actors all dressed in prosthetics and puppetry and robots — that set alone could probably easily have financed 100 Brigsby Bears. It was easily one of the most opulent sets I’ve ever been on. I’m fascinated not by just the scenes I’m in. When I had free time I would go and observe all these different actors and all these different scenes. The amount of talent that just is unrecognized… That’s why the credits run for an hour and a half. Because it takes thousands of people to successfully mount an epic of this size.


Read the FULL INTERVIEW right here at StarWars.com!


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