Mark Hamill buries grudge with Rian Johnson, explains his dark vision for Luke
Mark Hamill’s issues with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi are well known, with the Luke Skywalker actor disagreeing with how the director made the character entirely different from the one we knew from the original trilogy, turning him into a “Get off my lawn!”-yelling curmudgeon. But eight years removed from The Last Jedi’s release and divisive reception, Hamill is ready to bury the lightsaber with Johnson.
Mark Hamill recently appeared on Jesse Thorn’s Bullseye podcast (via IGN) so he could declare that there were no more clouds in his perception of Johnson over The Last Jedi. “Here’s the thing, and I’d love to clear this up: Rian Johnson is one of the most gifted directors I’ve ever worked with. He’s amiable, he’s fun on set, he’s smart. He made a great movie. I think the staging of the stand-off between Kylo Ren, Adam Driver and I at the end, is so well staged. The foreshadowing that I’m not really there. Adam wipes the snow away and you see the red planet beneath, I wipe the snow and it’s just snow. That’s so subtle. I love Knives Out and Brick and Looper. He’s one of my favorite directors…And the fact that I went public with my dissatisfaction with the motivation for Luke becoming a suicidal hermit might have colored things in a way that, maybe I should have kept that to myself. But I kept saying to Rian, ‘This would just make Luke double down even…’ and he said, ‘Well, your class at the Jedi Academy were wiped out.’ I said, ‘Rian, I saw entire planets wiped out! If anything, Luke doubles down and hardens his resolve in the face of adversity.’ So that’s all.”
Hamill had such an issue with how Johnson – who had the distinction of being the only solo writer for a Star Wars movie outside of George Lucas – was developing Luke for The Last Jedi that he had to create his own brutal backstory to reason to himself why Luke turned that way. Ready for this one? To Hamill, it came down to Luke leaving the Jedi life and having a child with a woman…only for the child to accidentally kill himself with a lightsaber, forcing the wife to off herself. Woah!
Mark Hamill and Rian Johnson both have movies out this year, with Hamill co-starring in Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk and Johnson releasing the third movie in the Knives Out series, Wake Up Dead Man.
Where do you stand on Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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