While Mark Hamill technically made his return as Luke Skywalker in “The Force Awakens,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is the film where we will finally get to really catch up with the iconic character and find out what he has been up to over the past 30 or so years.
Just the briefest sight of Luke Skywalker at the end of “The Force Awakens” was still enough to leave viewers on the edge of tears. But while Hamill kept himself together filming that moment, the actor admitted that he got choked up during production on “The Last Jedi,” specifically when he walked onto the Millennium Falcon for the first time in decades.
“It’s funny you should mention an emotional moment,” Hamill told me at the end of last month when I sat down to talk to the actor. “There was this documentary crew that was filming everything. Just hours and hours and hours of footage.”
“I got invited to speak at two universities and they came there. I said, ‘Really? Is this ‘Star Wars’ related?’ I went to the doctor, they were there with me, they wanted to see my foot get bandaged. It was crazy.”
“But they asked if I wanted to visit the Millennium Falcon set on a day that I wasn’t working. I was at the studio for something else. By this point we’re all friends. I went with my family, my whole family was there. I have two sons, a daughter, and my wife. We go onboard, and I started getting emotional. I started to feel myself well-up. And I was like, ‘Quell. Quell. Quell’.”
Hamill then described the emotion in more detail, remarking, “I can only describe it as going to see a house that you lived in as a little boy but hadn’t been back to in 20 years or whatever.”
“So it was totally unexpected. I was like, ‘Guys can you give me a minute?’ Even my family. I got choked up. And I wanted to say something. But I thought, ‘If I speak right now I will give it away’.”
At this point I asked Hamill whether he was surprised at just how emotional he became, to which he honestly admitted, “Yes, I was completely surprised. Absolutely. But what happened was, it was so accurate. Every oil drip. Every hanging tube. Every dent. The place where Chewie played the game, my sons were all posing there.”
“And I just had to move around to the cockpit and collect myself. I thought, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ It’s because it is sort of a beloved playhouse.”
You’ll be able to openly weep while watching “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” when it is finally released into cinemas on December 15.
