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Luke Skywalker himself helped send Star Wars Celebration off in style.
Mark Hamill spent his time at the event speaking with fans, teasing Star Wars: The Last Jedi and delivering a funny and emotional tribute to his late co-star Carrie Fisher.
So it was only appropriate that on Sunday he told yet another endearing story about one of his many real-life adventures with the actress. They were hanging around the studio lot after filming 1977’s Star Wars and he met her for lunch in Westwood.
(See his full panel above.)
The two walked by a movie theater, and Fisher told him that the trailer for Star Wars was playing in there. Neither had seen it, and Fisher told Hamill to ask the manager if they could be let in just to watch the trailer.
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“I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?'” he recalled. “She said, ‘Well, you’ve been on television for seven years. You’ve been on all these TV movies.”
So Hamill went to the woman working at the box office and explained that he and Fisher were two of the actors in a movie trailer being shown there. She rather reluctantly got the manager, who agreed to let them in to see the trailer.
“We went in and we watched it. It was so early they didn’t have John Williams’ score. They didn’t have very many special effects finished at all. A couple of shots of TIE Fighters, I think,” said Hamill. “It made a real impression on me because we hadn’t seen any of the footage.”
But the actor also recalled that the trailer wasn’t totally embraced by the audience at the screening.
“At the end of the trailer, it said, ‘A billion light years in the making. And it’s coming to your galaxy this summer.’ Big explosion. And somebody in the balcony yelled out, ‘Yeah, and it’s coming to the late show about two weeks after that,'” said Hamill. “Nobody enjoys a well-placed, snarky remark more than I do. So we both laughed, but after we laughed, we kind of went, ‘Uh oh.'”
Here’s the trailer:
Earlier in the panel, the star said it’s nice to be back as Luke on the big screen, because he’s spent years meeting young children who have no concept of time and don’t realize Star Wars was made decades ago — and those kids are shocked by how he looks today.
“Their parents, who were young children when the movies came out, would get very excited and push them toward me … ‘Look who it is! It’s Luke Skywalker!’ And you look at these 5- and 6-year-old kids, just horror-stricken. ‘Oh, my God! What happened to this guy? He really let himself go,'” related Hamill. “To have us come back, show that the aging process is natural, makes me less self-conscious.”
Hamill also spoke of shooting the original Star Wars and asking creator George Lucas if he could tweak the lines. Lucas would say no, but Hamill noticed Harrison Ford ad-libbed and wouldn’t get rebuked for it. Why was that?
“He [Ford] said, ‘Look, don’t ask. Just do it. [Lucas] has got so many things on his mind. A: He might not notice, and B: He might like it better if he sees it in performance,’ ” Hamill recalls his co-star saying.
Hamill also announced his web series Mark Hamill‘s Pop Culture Quest was returning for a second season, with an expanded run-time of eight 22-minute episodes. He also confirmed he appears in Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival, getting involved after he donated to the project’s Kickstarter and was contacted by the team.
Surrounded by fans, Hamill also spoke about his bona fides as a fan, noting he went to conventions before he knew Lucas.
“I want you to think of me as a friend, not as an internationally beloved BAFTA winner and pop-culture icon,” he joked. “I mean that in a humble way. Not in a horrible, egocentric way. Maybe a little bit.”
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