Mark Hamill thought that Star Wars was a parody of Flash Gordon when he first read the script.
Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: A New Hope
The 73-year-old actor played Luke Skywalker in the original film A New Hope, released in 1977, but he admits during the first readthrough he was convinced that creator George Lucas had written a spoof, inspired by the 1950s TV series based on the Flash Gordon 1930s comic strip.
Mark went to Harrison Ford – who played space smuggler Han Solo, the pilot of the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars – who had worked with Lucas before on American Graffiti for some insight, but his co-star didn’t offer a theory, so he then went to George who provided even less clarity on his vision.
Discussing Star Wars during an interview on UK TV show This Morning, Hamill said: “The thing is I didn’t get the whole script, for the screen test it was only eight pages. I thought, ‘Who talks like this?’ So I spoke to Harrison and you know what he said? ‘Hey kid, let’s just get it done.’ He was no help at all.
“I went to George. I said, ‘George this is sort of like a send up of Flash Gordon.’ He went, ‘Let’s just do it and talk about it later.’ Translation: let’s just do it and never talk about it later.
“He’s not a director who likes to talk about motivation and backstory. He casts people that are so close to what he wants that he doesn’t have to direct us. I was wide-eyed and energetic and all these things.”
Hamill also didn’t expect Luke to be the hero of the film, and was pleasantly surprised when he got the full script and realised Luke – who was originally called Luke Starkiller – was going to be the main protagonist.
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