Does anybody interview Mark Hamill about anything that isn’t Star Wars? I mean, I know they do but it doesn’t seem like it. Take this most recent interview with Den of Geek which is for the History series Knightfall, but of course, it turns to Star Wars. For a while it looked as if Hamill was done crapping on the franchise, having dropped his pants on it for months after The Last Jedi. But it turns out he’s still got a lot to say about the shit he doesn’t like and what he would do different…
“I just thought, Luke’s never going to see his best friend again. “You look at it in a self-centered way. I said that it was a big mistake that those three people would never reunite in any way. I guess I was wrong, because nobody seems to care! I have to stipulate that I care, but it didn’t really seem to affect the larger audience.”
Well, he got the “self-centered” part right. This may be the wrong analogy, but Hamill reminds me of legendary pro wrestler Bret “The Hitman” Hart, who got so invested in his character that he rejected any ideas that he didn’t personally agree with, and it led to his firing ultimately. Hamill doesn’t seem to be able to cope with Luke Skywalker dying, or really anything that Rian Johnson did.
He continues…
“Luke, Han and Leia will never be together again, and I’ll probably never get to work with Harrison again. Then the second thing was that they killed me off. I thought: oh, okay, you should push my death off to the last one. That’s what I was hoping when I came back: no cameos and a run-of-the-trilogy contract. Did I get any of those things? Because as far as I’m concerned, the end of VII is really the beginning of VIII. I got one movie! They totally hornswoggled me.”
Hamill continues by referencing a specific disagreement he had with Johnson, and in this case he was given the freedom to do something about it. But rather than be grateful about that, Hamill takes a particular line of dialogue from The Last Jedi and turns it into an attack on Johnson’s motives going in…
“They had me walking by 3PO, not even acknowledging him. I said: ‘I can’t do that!’ [Rian Johnson] said, ‘Okay, go over and do whatever.’ So I went over, and I did whatever. They say it in the script: ‘Forget the past, kill it if you have to,’ and they’re doing a pretty good job!”
Y’know, at this point I’ve got nothing left to say about The Last Jedi or Hamill’s continued grumbling about it. Whatever his thoughts, the Skywalker saga continues/concludes with Episode 9 on December 20th.
