{"id":75792,"date":"2025-08-17T06:43:27","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T06:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/75792\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T06:43:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T06:43:27","slug":"dad-wasnt-impressed-that-i-was-luke-skywalker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/75792\/","title":{"rendered":"Dad wasn\u2019t impressed that I was Luke Skywalker"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a pavement table outside Little Dom\u2019s, an unfussy Italian a couple of miles down the hill from the Hollywood sign, Mark Hamill sits in a leather jacket despite the California sunshine and explains what it was like when he first saw the Beatles on television at the age of 12. For the whole summer of 1963 a girl on his street had From Me to You glued to her record player, so he was already familiar with their sound, but on February 9, 1964, the Fab Four appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. \u201cThe next day at school, there was nobody who hadn\u2019t seen it,\u201d he says. \u201cForget the space movies, it was \u2014 still is \u2014 the biggest revolution in showbusiness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forget the space movies? For people of a certain age \u2014 my age \u2014 those space movies were as momentous as the Beatles had been for young Hamill. In the late Seventies and early Eighties we all had Star Wars-themed birthday parties and we all sunk our pocket money into Star Wars figurines. Playground conversation would turn invariably to Ewoks, lightsabers, stormtroopers and speeder bikes, and we all thought Jabba the Hutt was very lucky to have Princess Leia on a chain in her space bikini. Some of us got so absorbed in our Yoda impressions, talk normally we forgot how to. <\/p>\n

\"Mark<\/p>\n

Playing Luke Skywalker with his Jedi master, Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back (1980)<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

To meet the man who was \u2014 is \u2014 Luke Skywalker, then, is quite the nostalgia trip. Unlike his co-star Harrison Ford, Hamill did not sustain a career as a Hollywood superstar. Although his film and television credits run to the several hundred, he has spent the post-Star Wars decades in the relative obscurity of bit parts, cameos, Broadway shows and voice work. When he tried to audition for the title role in the film adaptation of Amadeus, having played the part successfully on stage, its director, Milos Forman, told him bluntly: \u201cOh no no, the Luke Skywalker is not to be being the Mozart.\u201d Tom Hulce was to be being Mozart instead. Like an ageing rock star still forced to play the hits from his debut album, Hamill remains trapped in a pop cultural moment of almost half a century ago. For a while in the 1990s he tried to downplay Star Wars in his Broadway credits \u2014 after a long list of theatre credits, his biography concluded with, \u201cHe\u2019s also known for a series of popular space movies.\u201d It took Carrie Fisher, lifelong friend and burster of bubbles, to put him straight \u2014 \u201cGet over yourself,\u201d he recently revealed she had told him. \u201cYou\u2019re Luke Skywalker. I\u2019m Princess Leia. Embrace it.\u201d <\/p>\n

Today, embracing it might be too strong, even if he did reprise the Skywalker role (and, spoiler alert, get to kill it off in the 2017 sequel The Last Jedi). \u201cIt wasn\u2019t me that was the big star, it was the vehicle that is,\u201d he says first before changing tack. \u201cHarrison is a wonderful actor. When I tested with him and we didn\u2019t have the whole [Star Wars] script, I just figured he was the leading man and I was the annoying sidekick. People would say, \u2018Oh, you know Harrison got nominated for an Oscar for \u2026\u2019 whatever it was. I told them, \u2018He deserves it.\u2019 In other words, I can\u2019t do what he does and nor would I try.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001014579921\"<\/p>\n

Filming Star Wars with Harrison Ford as Han Solo, Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia<\/p>\n

LFL<\/p>\n

Instead, Hamill claims, he is satisfied with life as \u201ca working stiff \u2026 As a kid I\u2019d see these character actors on The Twilight Zone and The Dick Van Dyke Show and I filed that away. \u2018I love that guy. He\u2019s always good. He shows up all the time in all these different things. What\u2019s his name?\u2019 It\u2019s me!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 The best Star Wars films and TV shows ranked \u2014 and the worst<\/a><\/p>\n

This self-effacement is well rehearsed \u2014 he\u2019s told other interviewers and, one suspects, himself many times in the mirror that he is happy with his lot. So much so that the 73-year-old says he was on the verge of retiring recently, the drive to get up and go to work having deserted him.\u201cI was OK financially and really content with my family life,\u201d he says. \u201cMy three kids live nearby so they can visit. I love the dogs [he has three]. I love my wife [he has one, Marilou, whom he married in 1978]. I love sitting out in the backyard with one of the two or three books I usually have on the go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some other things happened instead. This summer Hamill is starring in not one but two big Stephen King adaptations. In The Life of Chuck, a feelgood movie about the end of the world, he plays a grieving, alcoholic grandfather trying to convince his grandson Chuck that accountancy is better than dance. In The Long Walk, a very, very brutal dystopian horror in which 100 boys must keep walking on pain of a bullet to the head until only one is left, he plays the Major, a fascist leader in postdemocratic, postapocalyptic America. Both are proper character parts in proper movies. Mark Hamill is having a renaissance.<\/p>\n

\"Star<\/p>\n

With Eric Idle, left, and Ford at Carrie Fisher\u2019s rented flat in London, 1978. The gold record is by Monty Python<\/p>\n

CAMERA PRESS<\/p>\n

\"(L-R)<\/p>\n

With his wife, Marilou, and their children, Nathan, Chelsea and Griffin, 2018<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

King wrote The Long Walk, his first novel, to impress a girl when he was a 19-year-old sophomore in the mid-Sixties as the US was embroiling itself in the Vietnam War. It\u2019s hard now to imagine what it must have been like to live with the threat of conscription. Both King and Hamill were the perfect age for the draft \u2014 Hamill remembers it as \u201cthe most ghoulish game show ever where they drew birthdays \u2014 my birthday was only called at about 300 out of 365 but I had friends who got called within the first ten\u201d. <\/p>\n

At the height of the conflict Hamill was enrolled as a theatre student at Los Angeles City College. If he had dropped out to take acting jobs he would have been at risk \u2014 students could be exempted from the draft, waiters trying to get auditions could not. \u201cAnd I would have been hopeless [in Vietnam],\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t understand the war or why we were in the war. The idea of taking a gun and shooting another person \u2014 not for me. I would have had to have fled to Canada. I didn\u2019t have the money to get to Australia or England.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such is his dislike of US gun culture, Hamill was reluctant to take the role of the Major \u2014 firing space lasers is one thing, executing boys for entertainment is another. \u201cFrancis Lawrence, the director, understood what was troubling me,\u201d he says. \u201cAmerican society is gun violence and it\u2019s hard to get past that, but as I spoke to him I realised this is just the guy. He said he would have been surprised if I wasn\u2019t troubled by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

What was written as an allegory for Vietnam now becomes an allegory for modern America, something that Hamill, a lifelong and ardent Democrat, has long despaired of. \u201cA few weeks ago ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents were pulling people out of their cars,\u201d he says, pointing down the hill to LA, which has become a frontline city in President Trump<\/a>\u2019s clampdown on undocumented immigrants. \u201cThey wore masks and had no identification to show they were law enforcement. They were just brutalising people, kneeling on their necks. When I made the movie I wasn\u2019t thinking in terms of it being timely but it\u2019s proven to be just that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a pivotal scene in The Life of Chuck Hamill\u2019s character \u2014 old man, spectacles, white hair, whisky, about as far from cherubic Skywalker as you can imagine \u2014 gives a speech on the realities of life culminating in his belief that \u201cthe world loves dancers but it needs accountants\u201d. Father figures \u2014 good ones and bad ones \u2014 are key to understanding Hamill and perhaps how a \u201cworking stiff\u201d played those iconic \u201cI am your father\u201d scenes in The Empire Strikes Back with such vulnerability.<\/p>\n

Hamill\u2019s own father, William, was a navy captain in the US military at the height of the Cold War. The family moved from port to port, Hamill attending nine schools in 12 years in America and Japan. Good versus evil was his daily bread at a time when the generational gap between parents and kids was growing. Add in a good dose of strict Catholicism and it\u2019s hard to resist concluding that Star Wars, or at least the moral absolutism of it, was not entirely science fiction for Hamill. <\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001013521122\"<\/p>\n

His father, William, a US navy captain<\/p>\n

MARK HAMILL\/X<\/p>\n

When his father was on shore leave, he and his two brothers and four sisters \u2014 \u201cBill, Terry, Jan, me, Jeanie, Kim and Patrick,\u201d he rattles off \u2014 were subjected to routine inspections \u201cto make sure our beds were tucked right and all that stuff\u201d. When his father was away, his mother \u2014 who snuck a vote for Kennedy rather than Nixon in 1960 (\u201cdon\u2019t tell your father\u201d) \u2014 relaxed and so did the children. TV dinners were allowed and TV, for Hamill, was everything. While his siblings fell into line \u2014 his older brother became a doctor, \u201cso he was the big success in the family\u201d \u2014 Hamill escaped into a world of comic books, superheroes and King Kong.<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001013525119\"<\/p>\n

The Hamill family c\u20051959. Back row: Jan, Bill, William, Virginia, Terry. Front row: Mark, Jeanie, Kim<\/p>\n

His father, of course, disapproved. \u201cOne time,\u201d Hamill recalls, \u201cafter I\u2019d left the house, I put my ear up to the door and I actually heard the words, \u2018Sue, where did we go wrong?\u2019 \u201d He laughs as he tells me this so I ask why. \u201cBecause I knew I was right,\u201d he says, without hesitation.<\/p>\n

As with so many origin stories there was a teacher, Mr Burrill, who taught Hamill drama at Yokohama High School in Japan and told him that if he applied himself he could make it as an actor. In some senseshe already was making it. Hamill had to be chameleon-like. \u201cI\u2019ll give you a perfect example,\u201d he says. \u201cI had a pair of powder-blue Levi\u2019s \u2014 very cool in San Diego \u2014 but I made the mistake of wearing them when we moved to Annandale, Virginia. \u2018Hey, look at Surfer Joe here,\u2019 \u201d he mimics the other schoolkids. \u201cI never wore those pants again but the nickname stuck. I hated it but I didn\u2019t show it.\u201d <\/p>\n

His boyish good looks and perpetual new-kid status made Hamill an easy target for the jocks and bullies, but he would act his way out of trouble. \u201cI\u2019d perform scenes from Batman,\u201d he says and gives me a burst of vintage Adam West and Burt Ward. \u201cThe people who would ordinarily be beating you up \u2014 I\u2019d make them laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Portrait<\/p>\n

AUSTIN HARGRAVE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE<\/p>\n

The traditional route for wannabe actors with no connections was to move to New York and try for theatre auditions. At the risk of finding himself drafted to a faraway jungle, Hamill couldn\u2019t do that. Instead he moved to Los Angeles and got a part in a 99 cent theatre called the Zephyr. Somehow, through luck and determination, he had an agent within four months. Jobs followed \u2014 five or six guest spots, a main part on the critically acclaimed but quickly cancelled comedy Tobacco Road and a recurring role on the daytime soap General Hospital. \u201cI\u2019d only ever watched soaps to openly mock them but it was great for learning technique.\u201d <\/p>\n

Proud of his early foothold in the industry, he invited his father to visit him on the lot at 20th Century Fox. They watched the screening of a legal drama together and Hamill asked what his father thought. \u201cHe thought it was a quite remarkable depiction of young law students and that if I ever considered going to law school, he would match me dollar for dollar,\u201d he tells me. \u201cI thought I could level this guy right now by telling him I had been paid three times what he earned for my last sitcom but I thought better of it. I just nodded and promised to think about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Captain Hamill must have come around after the success of Star Wars, I suggest hopefully. \u201cHe didn\u2019t really get it,\u201d he says. \u201cHe was excited when Bob Hope asked me to be on his Christmas special.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001014744529\"<\/p>\n

An early TV role in the US sitcom The Partridge Family, as Jerry, the boyfriend of Laurie Partridge, played by Susan Dey, 1971<\/p>\n

I wonder if Hamill\u2019s perspective changed when he became a father himself. \u201cI tried to be the father I wanted but in retrospect I might have gone too far the other way,\u201d he admits. \u201cOnly one of my kids went to college. She received all these accolades but both the boys didn\u2019t go to college and I think what I should have done was give them an incentive\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n

At which point his daughter, Chelsea, 37, who has driven him to the restaurant, looks at her watch three tables along. She\u2019s caught between two roles today \u2014 that of an entertainment marketeer determined to keep to the schedule and that of a daughter who\u2019s heard all her dad\u2019s stories before. Yes, fine, we are here to talk about Hamill\u2019s new roles but it\u2019s almost impossible to suppress my inner nine-year-old and I find myself asking yet another question about a galaxy far, far away. Hamill is momentarily grumpy \u2014 he\u2019s said everything he\u2019s ever going to say about that.<\/p>\n

Minutes later he\u2019s talking about it anyway \u2014 as an unknown 25-year-old cast by George Lucas, he remembers how few people thought this strange space opera would be a hit. The studio couldn\u2019t even decide how to market it. Was it a film about a voyage beyond our imagination or was it a comedy about some rascals in space? It premiered without proper posters. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe first tip-off that it was something special was when I asked a driver to go by Grauman\u2019s Chinese Theater because I wanted to see what it looked like up on the marquee,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was the very first showing on the very first day but there were lines in both directions around the block. I\u2019d assumed it would have a following of hardcore sci-fi fans, people like me, but I never expected it to be that big.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of the sudden and intense celebrity that came with it, Hamill reverts to his default ambivalence. \u201cIt was a lot,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I knew that I hadn\u2019t changed. Everybody else was going nuts but you try to reassure yourself that nothing\u2019s really changed at all.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"USA.<\/p>\n

As an alcoholic grandad in the Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

\""The<\/p>\n

Playing the evil Major in The Long Walk, another Stephen King adaptation<\/p>\n

AVALON.RED<\/p>\n

As a child he\u2019d watched the Beatles in A Hard Day\u2019s Night with a degree of envy. \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be wonderful to be chased down the street by a pack of screaming girls,\u201d he\u2019d thought. \u201cWhen I watched it again as an adult, it was a horror film! They couldn\u2019t go anywhere. They had no life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that he didn\u2019t try to enjoy his own fame. \u201cAt the height of it all I was in Vegas going out with the showgirls and enjoying the good life,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was before STDs and it was, you know, recreational but it wasn\u2019t me. Girls coming to the stage door asking me to come to their hotel \u2014 the sex will only take 15 minutes, they\u2019d say, before listing all the other people they\u2019d done.\u201d He looks distressed at the memory but relaxes when I ask about his wife, Marilou.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was a dental hygienist and I went to get my teeth cleaned and I was just enamoured from the get-go,\u201d he says. \u201cI asked her out and I thought she better have a sense of humour. We went to see Annie Hall and she got it. She was an oasis in all the madness.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u2022 Star Wars top 50: the best moments, greatest characters, finest quotes and worst missteps<\/a><\/p>\n

They married in December 1978 at the home they had just bought in Malibu. They had their first child, Nathan, in St John\u2019s Wood, north London \u2014 they rented there while Hamill worked on the Star Wars films \u2014 but they have lived happily back in California almost ever since. In January the Palisades fire swept across the valley. The house survived but the whole area is still uninhabitable. Hamill doesn\u2019t know how long it will be before they can return. <\/p>\n

\"*PREMIUM-EXCLUSIVE*<\/p>\n

Hamill\u2019s house narrowly avoided destruction in the LA wildfires in January<\/p>\n

BACKGRID<\/p>\n

In an industry powered by ego, it\u2019s hard not to be suspicious of Hamill\u2019s apparent lack of it but by the end of our conversation I\u2019m sold. Typecast as a Jedi but still desperate to play character parts, he is at his most animated when talking about voiceover work (and its creative anonymity). His Joker in DC Comics\u2019 Batman: The Animated Series is revered by fans just as much as his Skywalker. He is just as happy to do the Joker\u2019s maniacal laugh on request in the grocery store as he is to show off his Jedi powers (he likes to wave his hand in time with motion sensors on electric doors). And despite talk of his retirement, he is clearly delighted with his chance to flex his full acting abilities in this Stephen King double-billing of a summer.<\/p>\n

Today he fights not with a lightsaber but with a keyboard, using that wit honed through all those high schools. Having left Facebook because he was mad at Zuckerberg and Twitter because he was mad at Musk, he now expresses his horror at the state of America via Bluesky. I avoid mentioning Trump until the end of our conversation because it\u2019s a subject that risks hijacking an entire afternoon. Sure enough, my late request for Hamill\u2019s state of the union results in a lengthy monologue. \u201cThe bullying, the incompetence, the people in place\u2026 The only way I can deal with it without going crazy and wanting to open my veins in a warm tub is to look at it like a thick, sprawling political novel,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s entertaining in a way because this could actually be the end. Our status in the world has been crippled and that will reverberate for decades. Making Canada a 51st state? Do you know how offensive that is? And then taking over Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. The distractions are hilarious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Star<\/p>\n

With Harrison Ford at a concert in California, 2015<\/p>\n

GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

Hamill continues exasperating himself and then he tries to cheer himself up. \u201cI still believe there are more honest, decent people than there are the Maga crowd,\u201d he says. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t, I\u2019d move back to England.\u201d<\/p>\n

He could do an Ellen DeGeneres, I suggest, and try the Cotswolds. He nods and says that when Trump was re-elected, he gave his wife a choice: London or Ireland. \u201cShe\u2019s very clever,\u201d he says. \u201cShe didn\u2019t respond right away but a week later she said, \u2018I\u2019m surprised you would allow him to force you out of your own country.\u2019 That son of a bitch, I thought. I\u2019m not leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laugh and he laughs. Then I shake the hand that Darth Vader cut off and ask him to sign my Luke Skywalker figurine. It\u2019s for my youngest, I lie, and he obliges. Hamill might be Skywalker and Skywalker might be Hamill but on the whole they both seem fine with it.
The Life of Chuck is in cinemas from Wednesday<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At a pavement table outside Little Dom\u2019s, an unfussy Italian a couple of miles down the hill from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":75793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-75792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}