Mark Hamill’s career after Star Wars has been less- than-stellar but as Robbie Collin finds out, the Jedi is ready to return.
He may not be its biggest star, but the man known as Luke Skywalker is the true centre of the Star Wars universe There's nothing about the kid in the audition tape that immediately screams "saviour of the galaxy". He's 24, in a checked shirt and dark pullover, and is looking down at his feet. His line readings are equally subdued - but given the lines themselves include, "I doubt if the actual security there is any greater than it was on Aquilae or Sullust, and what there is is most likely directed towards a large-scale assault," it'd perhaps be unfair to expect him to sound like Brando in Streetcar.
But towards the end of the audition, something happens. The kid shifts forward in his seat, his eyes widen, and he starts to glow.
"How many more systems have to get blown away before you have no place to hide and are forced to fight?" he asks the 30-something actor sitting beside him. (That's Harrison Ford, from the smash hit George Lucas coming-of-age film American Graffiti.) What he's got is conviction - but a strange, contagious kind that makes Luke Skywalker's overstuffed lines feel as urgent and real to you as they seem to be to him. Back in December 1975, Mark Hamill was nobody special - a jobbing television actor, with a few bit-parts in sitcoms and soap operas under his belt. But in that moment, he became someone you could believe in.
Almost 40 years after that tape was recorded, I saw Hamill on stage in California, talking about director J.J. Abrams' Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and his long-awaited return to the role that made him. Looking a little paunchy and crumpled in a grey-blue shirt and loose leather jacket, with a 90s news-anchor haircut, you probably wouldn't place the now-64-year-old actor as a saviour of the galaxy either. But from the reactions of the 7,500-strong crowd in the Anaheim Convention Center, you'd have to say the Force was still with him.
He reminisced about the old days, revelling in the shoestring weirdness of the original productions. While filming the scenes in the swamps for The Empire Strikes Back, for example, Yoda's dialogue had been fed to him through a radio earpiece that would often pick up a local pop music station - he recalled that during one particularly heartfelt scene, the ancient Jedi master's croaky wisdom was suddenly replaced by More, More, More, a disco song by the former adult film star Andrea True.
He also spoke about the lunch he'd shared with Lucas and Carrie Fisher in 2013, during which Lucas had broached the subject of both actors returning, along with Ford, for Episode VII.
"My wife said beforehand, 'Maybe they're doing another film,' and I laughed at her," he said. "I thought he was going to ask us to do press for the 3D versions, or another box set.
"I was in a state of shock ... I couldn't say yes or no. But later I thought, 'It's not like a choice'. It's like I was drafted. Can you imagine if, for some reason, I'd said I didn't want to do it? I'd be the most hated person in fandom." For now, though, Hamill's standing seems secure. There's a genuine fondness in his relationship with Star Wars fans: take his autographs, which often come with a self-deprecating aside. (On a trading card that shows Luke looking for Darth Vader, he wrote: "This Vader guy is a loser ... Hope he doesn't have kids.") And while those fans know roughly what to expect from Han and Leia in Episode VII, it's the role of Luke, while apparently a linchpin of the plot, that remains a mystery. The trailers have offered only one glimpse of him to date: a robotic hand resting on R2-D2's head. But Hamill's Alec Guinness-esque beard during a spell filming on the remote Irish island of Skellig Michael in July 2014 suggests that Luke may have gone into exile in much the same way as Guinness' Obi-Wan Kenobi did in the original Star Wars film. Or perhaps, as rumour has it, he's the film's chief villain.
There's no question that Hamill still matters - both to Star Wars and its fans. But I've resisted calling him a movie star because, after seeing him that night, even with the entire arena cheering him on, I'm not entirely sure he is one. In 1981, shortly after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, People magazine quoted Hamill as saying the Star Wars films had turned him into "an icon, like Mickey Mouse" - and though the piece made no mention of his tone, it seems unlikely to have been one of untrammelled glee.
Mark Hamill with The Force Awakens Stormtroopers.
Not that there's anything wrong with Mickey Mouse: in fact, the Disney character was a welcome note of constancy in Hamill's otherwise unsettled childhood. His father was a captain in the US Navy, which meant he and his siblings (Hamill was the fourth of seven) grew up between California, Virginia, New York, and Yokohama and Yokosuka in Japan.
Watching The Mickey Mouse Club after school with his brothers and sisters was a favourite activity - while the black-and-white Adventures of Superman TV series, starring George Reeves, introduced him to the pleasures of superheroism.
When he was 17, his family returned to California, and he moved to the city, studying drama at Los Angeles City College and renting a place of his own (a garden shed, for $55 a month).
He was blond, chipper and good-looking in an earnest kind of way: network television beckoned. His first bit-part was on The Bill Cosby Show in 1970, while his first regular gig came two years later, as a lovestruck teen on the ABC soap opera General Hospital. It was in 1975 that Hamill's friend Robert Englund - who would go on to play the dream-stalking serial killer Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street - tipped him off about a promising-sounding audition. Two hot young directors, George Lucas and Brian De Palma, were holding a joint casting call at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood. Lucas was looking for new faces for a long-gestating sci-fi fantasy adventure, that was then-titled The Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Starkiller.
Before that day, Lucas had intended to give the part of Luke to William Katt, another bright-eyed, blond, young TV actor. But as the audition tape attests, Hamill was the New Hope the director had been searching for.
On the day that first film opened, Lucas and Hamill drove past Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, and saw that the queue for Star Wars ran around the block. "I wanted to lean out the window," Hamill told Gossip magazine in 1978, "and say, 'Why are you here? Why did you do this?'" It's strange and not a little eerie to think that Star Wars: A New Hope was almost Hamill's final film as well as his first. On January 11, 1977, a little over five months before the film's release, Hamill crashed his new BMW on a freeway in southern California. The actor broke his nose and both cheekbones: the face that cinema-goers around the world were about to get to know was gone.
"I just woke up and I was in the hospital, and I knew that I had hurt myself very, very badly," he said in 1978. "And then someone held a mirror up to my face, and I just felt that my career was over." Hamill has rarely spoken about the crash, other than to acknowledge that it happened, and that his dramatic facial scarring at the opening of The Empire Strikes Back - after his mauling on the ice-blown wastes of Hoth by a hungry wampa - was only partly artificial.
In May 1981, a year after the release of The Empire Strikes Back, he relocated to New York with his wife, Marilou York, a dental hygienist he'd met between making the two Star Wars films, and their son. His plan was to broaden his range, do a little theatre, before returning to Elstree Studios in early 1982 to shoot Return of the Jedi.
He had a juicy Broadway debut lined up: the lead role in The Elephant Man. But the show, which had by then been running for over two years, closed within three weeks of his debut, before the critics even had a chance to see him.
A second assault - taking over the title role in Amadeus from Tim Curry for a nine-month run in 1983 - was significantly more successful, and Hamill spent most of the remainder of the 80s on stage. Occasionally he dipped back into film, although the films rarely merited the effort. (An exception - arguably the exception - is The Big Red One, a war movie he made with Lee Marvin in 1980, between A New Hope and Empire.) You might think his role in Amadeus would have stood him in perfect stead for Milos Forman's 1984 film adaptation of that play. But apparently a fretful executive producer told Forman and his casting directors: "I don't want Luke Skywalker in this film." And that, more or less, has been Hollywood's mantra ever since. Cheeringly, though, Hamill hasn't let it stop him.
He was a climate change professor in Matthew Vaughn's Kingsman: the Secret Service, a lightsaber-wielding bad guy in Kevin Smith's Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and popped up as a villain in the current superhero series The Flash. (The writers even gave him an "I am your father" line, for old times' sake.) For him, however, Episode VII is film-making on another scale. It's easy to forget that the original Star Wars trilogy films were seat-of-the-pants productions: Hamill once (very generously) compared the gulf between them and Lucas' more recent prequels to that between "a garage band" and "a philharmonic". Under the sprightly baton of J.J. Abrams, he's finally sitting with the orchestra.
Grab your copy of the TimeOut Star Wars: The Force Awakens special today. Inside, we've got interviews with Harrison Ford, director JJ Abrams, new villains Adam Driver and Gwendoline Christie plus a look back at the ten best Star Wars scenes - so far. And who is the NZ telly star only too keen to don the Stormtrooper helmet on our cover?
