Warning: No spoilers to follow, but be prepared for a huge bummer.
The Force Awakens was all about finding Luke Skywalker, and finding out exactly why such a brave warrior went into hiding. What was Luke up to over the three decades between Return of the Jedi and our reunion with him on Ahch-To? What was he doing when he wasn’t training his nephew Ben Solo? And how did the events of Luke’s life influence the broken man we will meet at the end of the 2017 film? That was a question Mark Hamill had to ask himself to get into the right frame of mind for his performance in The Last Jedi, and it led him down a very dark, sad road.
To get to the right emotional place to play the weary Luke of today, Hamil he came up with a story of love turned tragic, as he told EW. (Don’t worry about this giving anything away about The Last Jedi, because it’s not canon and won’t come up in the movies—this was just an acting tool for Hamill.)
The backstory he came up with is that at some point Luke fell in love with a widow who had a child. That led Luke to leave the Jedi order to marry her, but then something awful happened. “The child got hold of a lightsaber and accidentally killed himself,” said Hamill, who said he couldn’t help but think about all the children who die from accidental gun incidents.
If that sounds especially bleak, it was intentional. “I had to go to really dark places to get where Luke needed to be for this story,” Hamill said. That gives us some insight into just how emotionally damaged he will be when we finally catch up with him in The Last Jedi, especially since Hamill said he discussed this story with director Rian Johnson to make sure he was getting to where the character needed to be.
What do you make of this story Hamill came up with? What does it tell us about The Last Jedi? Go down the path to our comments below to let us know.
Images: Lucasfilm
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