In a new interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Star Wars‘ Mark Hamill unpacked his recent resurgence in popularity, stating, “I certainly didn’t expect to have this sudden burst of life so late in the game. I should be spending time wandering the beaches with a metal detector. I can’t explain why, all of a sudden, I have five features this year.”
As the actor notes, “There was a point about five years ago where I thought that it’s not easy getting older, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it on camera. So I thought that I’ve had enough on-camera. I’m going to continue working but in voiceover only. Then Mike Flanagan and his producer, Trevor Macy, contacted me to do The Fall of the House of Usher. I was playing the family lawyer to a really evil family—a soulless, truly evil guy. And I loved it. It was minimalist. It was unlike anything I had ever done, and it sort of rekindled my satisfaction of doing things on camera.”
The erstwhile Luke Skywalker has been primarily a voice actor for over 30 years now—and he’s been enjoying a spate of juicy villain roles lately. In addition to the aforementioned Usher, the actor voiced King Herod in Charles Dickens’ bizarre recount of Biblical events, The King of Kings; Skeletor in Netflix’s recent Masters of the Universe series; and an irascible bear named Thorn in the Oscar-nominated The Wild Robot. Later this year, Hamill is even lending his voice to the legendary Flying Dutchman in the latest SpongeBob SquarePants movie.
However, Hamill is now beginning to regain the most consistent live-action work (not playing himself) he’s had since the 1980s. In the last year, the actor has received praise for his role as an alcoholic grandfather in The Life of Chuck, reprised his Corvette Summer role as Kenneth W. Dantley, Jr. in a Green Day music video, and is now set to play the child-killing “Major” in the long-awaited film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Long Walk, in theaters tomorrow.
As to why Hamill’s star is suddenly rising after so many years as a (jocular, at least…) Hollywood punchline, the outlet cites his 2017 return as the older, angrier, far more world-weary Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi.
Though Hamill has done cartoon voice work since the 1970s, he is undoubtedly best known for voicing the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series. As he recounts to THR, “It was right after they announced that Michael Keaton was cast as Batman, and the fan community freaked out, ‘Oh, he’s Mr. Mom. He’s a comic actor.’ So even though I really wanted the part, I thought, ‘If they freaked out about Mr. Mom being Batman, how are they going to feel about Luke Skywalker being the Joker? There’s no way I’m going to get this!’”
“And because I believed that, I was completely calm and relaxed. I just let it rip. I drove out of the parking lot really cocky: ‘Top that, try to find a better Joker than that.’ People didn’t even believe it was me. They thought it was treated or sped up or who knows what. But it was a fundamental reason I got so many interesting roles in voiceover.”
While THR’s piece celebrates the actor for no longer being “pigeonholed” by casting directors for playing Luke Skywalker, it got me thinking: given his new synonymity for villain roles, Hamill may now be “pigeonholed” into an entirely different role by a younger generation of filmmakers. He may have spent his career haunted by Star Wars, but perhaps having played Luke Skywalker no longer defines Mark Hamill. Now, the Joker does.
The Long Walk is in theaters September 12.
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