Mark Hamill making an appearance as Luke Skywalker in the second season of The Mandalorian was a great Easter egg moment for Star Wars fans who believed that they had seen the last of the character after his divisive appearances in the sequel trilogy. For Hamill, though, there was a very special feeling about being able to fill in a missing part of Luke’s Star Wars journey that he had not been able to fulfill in any of the movies.
While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the release of Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk, in which he stars as a sadistic army officer overseeing a brutal “walk-or-die” dystopian marathon, Hamill shared his feelings on why his appearance in The Mandalorian was something he really just had to do.
“The reason I did Mandalorian was that Luke had a beginning and an end. There was no middle. It was like making a trilogy about James Bond as a young boy who first became aware of the Secret Service and wanted to be a part of it. Part two was him training to be an agent. Part three is earning his license to kill — The End. No From Russia With Love, Dr. No or Goldfinger.
“You never got to see Luke as a Master Jedi at the peak of his powers. He was the most idealistic character in that series. He was someone who would take adversity and double down and come back and counter his setbacks. We didn’t see any of that. So when I got the chance, I thought, ‘Geez, this is wonderful.’ I think Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, boy, do they get Star Wars. They get it. They’re speaking the same language that George did in a way that I questioned in the sequels.”
Mark Hamill Had an Alternate Luke Skywalker Backstory for ‘The Last Jedi’
Although Luke Skywalker’s story came to a controversial end in The Last Jedi, his whole backstory could have been much darker than the one that ended up in Rian Johnson’s controversial entry in the franchise. When appearing on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn in June, Hamill revealed:
“I thought, what could make someone give up a devotion to what is basically a religious entity, to give up being a Jedi?Well, the love of a woman. So he falls in love with a woman. He gives up being a Jedi. They have a child together. At some point the child, as a toddler, picks up an unattended lightsaber, pushes the button and is killed instantly. The wife is so full of grief, she kills herself. I thought, that would be… because I hear these horrible stories about these children who find unattended guns and wind up dead. That resonated with me so deeply that, that could possibly… but he didn’t have the time to tell a backstory like that, I’m guessing. He just wanted a brief thing to explain it. And to me, it didn’t justify it.
That said — and I told him [Johnson] this — despite the fact that I disagree with your choices for Luke, I’m going to do everything within my power to make your screenplay work as best as I can. And the only thing unfortunate about that is, I’ve heard comments from fans who think that I somehow dislike Rian Johnson, and nothing could be further from the truth.”
Needless to say that the story audiences were treated to was perhaps not the best received of any character’s arc in the sequels, but whether a darker turn would have helped the movie in any way is something we will never know. However, it seems that, for Hamill, he has done everything he wanted to with Luke Skywalker, and there is little else anyone can ask for in a role.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
