Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi is a movie packed with tons of surprises, but one that nobody really saw coming is that Mark Hamill actually plays two different roles. In addition to playing the legendary Luke Skywalker, he is also credited as Dobbu Scay -- the strange little alien that keeps pumping coins into BB-8 on Canto Bight. This little detail was revealed shortly after the film's release, but what you probably didn't know is that filming the scene involved Hamill playing around on set with a giant version of the beloved ball droid. He recently told me,
I just said, 'I'd love to do a motion capture role of some sort.' And so one Saturday afternoon down I went... now people said, 'Oh, it was voiced by Mark Hamill.' No! I was in a motion capture suit, and they had a BB-8 that was proportionally right for how small the character was. It was big! So I had a blast. I really loved doing that.
The production team behind Star Wars: The Last Jedi apparently went all out for Mark Hamill's first experience in the world of performance capture, going as far as to build a giant, scale BB-8 that would fully allow Hamill to embody Dobbu Scay. I was impressed to learn this when I recently sat down with the actor for a one-on-one interview in Dublin, Ireland, where Hamill was named Guest of Honour for the city's St. Patrick's Day festival. I had asked the actor about playing other roles in the Star Wars universe, and he gifted me the funny tale of playing what is actually his third character in the franchise (he previously voiced Darth Bane on the animated Star Wars: The Clone Saga series)
It should recognized that Mark Hamill's part as Dobbu Scay wasn't exactly hidden, as he is actually given a credit at the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. That being said, it was a credit that he himself really never expected to get, and was surprisingly well-prepared to avoid. The whole thing was initially designed to be a funny, buried gag that would allow Hamill some motion capture experience, so he was as surprised as anyone to see the little alien's name next to his own at the end of the film. He added,
I was very surprised that Rian [Johnson] billed me as Dobbu Scay... I thought it was going to be an Easter egg. I didn't say, 'Oh, I need billing.' And if I did have billing, in the past as a pseudonym I've used a combination of my brothers' names, and I call myself Patrick Williams.
Naturally, I now plan on looking for the name Patrick Williams in all of Mark Hamill's past work.
This was only a portion of my interview with Mark Hamill, and there's plenty more to come. Stay tuned here on CinemaBlend for the rest of my sit down with the sci-fi legend, and be on the lookout for Star Wars: The Last Jedi on Blu-ray and DVD, which will be in stores everywhere this Tuesday, March 27th.
