Why Mark Hamill Initially Didn't Want to Return as Luke

Share. J.J. Abrams talks storyline similarities and Hamill's reluctance to play Luke again. J.J. Abrams talks storyline similarities and Hamill's reluctance to play Luke again.

As well as setting the internet on fire last night with his talk of a certain character's parentage, J.J. Abrams has also been discussing problems behind-the-scenes on The Force Awakens set, revealing that there was no initial chemistry between Rey and Finn, explaining why the plot of Episode 7 is so similar to Episode 4, and revealing why Mark Hamill was resistant to returning as Luke.

Speaking to Chris Rock at the Tribeca Film Festival, Abrams kicked off by stating that Episodes 8 and 9 will move the Star Wars saga to new lands. Abrams said, “This movie [The Force Awakens] was a bridge and a kind of reminder; the audience needed to be reminded what Star Wars is, but it needed to be established with something familiar, with a sense of where we are going to new lands, which is very much what 8 and 9 do.”

Abrams acknowledged the negative feedback the film has received from some who believe episode 7 was a carbon copy of A New Hope. Yet he felt that was the only way that he could succeed with putting life back into the franchise. “The weird thing about that movie is that it had been so long since the last one. Obviously the prequels had existed in between and we wanted to, sort of, reclaim the story. So we very consciously - and I know it is derided for this - we very consciously tried to borrow familiar beats so the rest of the movie could hang on something that we knew was Star Wars.”

“So all the characters - the Stormtrooper who turns, Finn played by John Boyega, and Rey, the character that Daisy plays, the Scavenger, Kylo Ren, the son of Han and Leia, and Poe the pilot - all these were characters and sort of their roles in the story needed to exist in something that predates them.”

Abrams also revealed that the injury sustained by Harrison Ford on set - when he broke his leg after a piece of the Millennium Falcon set fell on him - was a blessing in disguise, because it allowed him to work on the chemistry between Boyega and Ridley, which he felt had been flat.

"When I was on the set of the Millennium Falcon and we started to do work with Rey and Finn, the first time we did it, it didn’t work at all,” explains Abrams. “It was much more contentious. I didn’t direct it right. It was set up all wrong, and when Harrison Ford got injured - which was a very scary day - we ended up having a few weeks off, and it was during that time that I really got to look at what we had done and rewrite quite a bit of that relationship. So when we came back to work again, we actually just reshot from the ground up, those scenes. It was an amazingly helpful thing to get these two characters to where they needed to be.”

He also revealed that Mark Hamill was initially resistant to return as Luke Skywalker when he realised that his role would be limited to just the final scene. “We knew that getting to Luke was the whole story, and I was desperate to do the next chunk that we knew would not fit into this one movie. But, we knew that we had that ending, but it was a frightening and tricky thing to do, but at first and in all honesty, Mark Hamill was a little resistant.”

“Imagine reading Star Wars, imagine being Mark Hamill and you get the script for the new Star Wars. 'Oh the opening is good, page two, oh, three and so on - what the f**k is the going on, I’m three pages before the end, the last page, what?' He was so kind to do it, and at first he was like, 'Will it seem silly, will it be a joke that he is standing there?' I said to him, ‘I don’t think it will.’ I said because the whole movie is about that, it could be a great fun drum roll, up to seeing this guy.”

It was while filming the final scene on an island off the coast of Ireland that JJ Abrams made the realisation that, “Hamill was the exact same age as Alec Guinness was when he played Obi-Wan. I’m looking at him in the robes, and with the John Williams music, I start to tear up, and I know that this ending could really work.”