Harrison Ford hasn’t mentioned anything about Star Wars: The Force Awakens publically. Even Carrie Fisher has been mum since that amazing first trailer dropped. But their colleague Mark Hamill has been his usual chatty, open self, talking about the young talent involved in the new cast, and how he never dreamed he’d EVER get an opportunity to hold Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber again.
"The fact that [Star Wars] is so special to so many people … it’s hard to believe you could take something for granted like that," Mark Hamill tells EW in an interview. Especially when you consider the fact that George Lucas had basically led Hamill to believe that he’d never be Skywalker again. The way the actor tells it, he says:
We had a beginning, middle, and an end. And I certainly, in a million years, never expected to return. I thought, even if they do more trilogies, my story is over. … George [Lucas] had told us that he wasn’t going to do them many, many years ago—but times and circumstances change."
They certainly do. Massive studios swoop in with open bank vaults and pay huge sums of money for the opportunity to tell more Star Wars stories. And actors who hadn’t stepped foot on Tatooine or boarded a Millennium Falcon in decades suddenly try to squeeze back into costumes that hadn’t fit since Return of the Jedi. As EW notes, Disney paid somewhere north of $4 billion for the rights to the LucasFilm cataloge, and that is giving Mark Hamill a second chance that he’s choosing to relish. It’s amazing to hear him talk about how much more he’s appreciating the experience on this go round, telling EW:
"It’s kind of like Scrooge on Christmas morning. ‘Oh my God, this time I’m going to appreciate it in a way I wasn’t able to as a young man.’ … That’s probably not the best way to express what it was. We knew it was special, but [returning for the new trilogy] reminded me of taking out a pair of trousers from the back of the closet and discovering a $20 bill in the pocket."
Or a $4 billion bill. Look, we already proved that George Lucas was terrible at predicting the future of his Star Wars universe. And he hasn’t even watched this glorious trailer:
But Mark Hamill seems to be coming at this all from the happiest and healthiest points of view. Probably because he never dreamed an opportunity like this would come around again.
