What if Han Solo was the protagonist of Star Wars? That’s what Mark Hamill thought when he booked the sci-fi film.
On the Feb. 17 episode of the Smartless podcast, Hamill, 73, reflected on his original screen test with Harrison Ford, 82, for the 1977 film. Hamill said that when he first read the script, he wondered if Star Wars was meant to be “a parody” of other space adventure films. When he asked Ford, he told the younger actor, “Let’s just do it, and we’ll talk about it later.”
“Translation: let’s just do it and we’ll never talk about it later,” Hamill said.
“When I tested, I figured Harrison’s the leading man. I’m like the annoying sidekick,” he continued. “Because I’m badgering him and all this stuff.”
But after he booked the part, he opened the script, which was then called The Adventures of Luke Starkiller. “And I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Wasn’t I Luke?’ ” He figured he was wrong and Ford was Luke. “He was a traditional leading man. He was 35 or whatever, and he was Harrison Ford. Come on,” Hamill remembered.
“So I started to read this thing and, in the very beginning, I realized, ‘Oh my god. This is seen through the eyes of this teenage farm boy.’ That was unusual in and of itself. You’d think it’d probably be through the eyes of Han Solo.”
Hamill was 24 when he filmed Star Wars (which was eventually retitled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope). He told the Smartless hosts that he “idolized” Ford, which helped make the relationship between Luke and Han “real.” He said, “I looked at him as a mentor or an older brother and all that.”
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Still, he joked, when he read the script, he thought, “Oh, my God. Why don’t I ever get the part of the womanizing gambler and scoundrel?” Instead, he said, Luke could sometimes be a “whiny baby” — which was important to the journey the Jedi-in-training goes on in the film.
Hamill, Ford and costar Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, also starred in 1980’s Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi. Ford and Fisher reprised their roles in 2015’s Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens, while Hamill had a cameo at the film’s end. Hamill and Fisher both appeared in 2017’s Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi, released after Fisher’s 2016 death. Hamill also cameoed in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and in the Disney+ series The Mandalorian.
Hamill’s career outside of Star Wars has included many acclaimed roles as a voice actor, including, most notably, his time voicing the Batman villain The Joker. He also voiced a role in the 2024 Oscar-nominated film Wild Robot.
Though Hamill sometimes struggled with how much audiences associated him with Luke, he told PEOPLE in 2017 that it was Fisher who helped him make peace with it. “She said, ‘Look, I am Princess Leia. You are Luke. Get over it,’ ” he remembered. “She was able to cut to the quick and see the positives. I learned so much from her.”
Read the full article here
