Star Wars legend Mark Hamill recently revealed that a television role saved him from retiring from on-camera acting.
Videos by Suggest
During a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hamill spoke about how aging almost ended his on-camera acting career.
“There was a point about five years ago where I thought that it’s not easy getting older, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it on camera. So I thought that I’ve had enough on-camera. I’m going to continue working, but in voiceover only.”
However, Mike Flanagan and his producer, Trevor Macy, approached him to play a role in Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He played Arthur Gordon Pym, the family’s attorney and fixer. He was nicknamed “The Pym Reaper” due to his ruthlessness and efficiency.
“I was playing the family lawyer to a really evil family,” Hamill explained. “A soulless, truly evil guy. And I loved it. It was minimalist. It was unlike anything I had ever done, and it sort of rekindled my satisfaction of doing things on camera.”
He further pointed out, “Then, with The Life of Chuck, I’ve seen it now three times. My wife has seen it like six times. She says, “It’s my favorite thing you’ve ever done.'”
Mark Hamill Admitted His Return to Star Wars Could Have Been a “Mistake”
Hamill also spoke about how nervous he was that his return to the Star Wars franchise would be a mistake.
“I had real reservations about coming back. I thought it would be a mistake,” he admitted. “You can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice — they should really focus on a new generation of characters.”
Hamill then said that if it weren’t for Harrison Ford’s return as Han Solo, he more than likely wouldn’t have gone back.
“I thought, ‘Well, Harrison [Ford] is not going to do it anyway,'” he recalled. “You could see his irritation with constantly having to talk about Han Solo. Once I saw in the press that he had accepted, I felt like I had been drafted — because if I’m the only one [of the original trio, along with the late Carrie Fisher] who says no, I’ll be the most hated man in nerd-dom.”
In regard to what lessons he wished he had learned early on in his acting career, Hamill said, “Don’t sweat the smallest stuff. The older you get, the less you care — but I don’t mean that you don’t care about the work or your values.”
“It’s the things that you would obsess about before, ‘Why did they write that about me?'” he added. “People are going to say what they’re going to say regardless. So focus on the work and less about the image.