We’re just a couple years away from the 50th anniversary of A New Hope, the very first of the Star Wars movies in order (release-wise), which, among other things, catapulted Mark Hamill to worldwide fame. Amazingly, this was the actor’s film debut following numerous TV appearances, and he would go on to reprise Luke Skywalker five more times on the big screen. But in the lead-up to Hamill playing Luke for the first time, he initially didn’t realize that he’d been cast as Star Wars’ lead character, though I can understand his confusion given the title page he read.
Hamill discussed being cast in Star Wars: A New Hope while chatting with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on their Smartless podcast. He started off by recalling:
When I tested, I figured, ‘Oh, Harrison’s the leading man. I’m like, the annoying sidekick, right?’ ‘Cause I’m badgering him and all this stuff.
When it comes to life experience, Han Solo definitely had Luke Skywalker beat by light years. While the latter had only lived a sheltered life on Tatooine in his first 19 years, the former had been flying around with Chewbacca in the Millennium Falcon for years going on adventures (the first of which were chronicled in Solo: A Star Wars Story, which can be streamed with a Disney+ subscription). However, once Mark Hamill cracked open the Star Wars: A New Hope script, he was surprised to learn that the the movie was centered on Luke on him rather than the vest-wearing scoundrel. As the actor explained:
When I opened to the first page, it said, ‘The Adventures of Luke Starkiller as Taken from The Journal of the Whills, Saga No.1 – the Star Wars’. And I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, wasn’t I Luke?’ No, I guess Harrison was Luke, ‘cause I figured he was a traditional leading man. He was 35 or whatever and he was Harrison Ford, come on. So I started to read this thing – in the very beginning, I realized, ‘Oh my god, this is seen through the eyes of this teenage farm boy.’ I mean, that was unusual in and of itself. You’d think it’d probably be through the eyes of Han Solo. But that’s the journey…
I mean, can you blame him for his original assumption? I’ll say again, Mark Hamill hadn’t acted in any movies before Star Wars, and along with already having a decent amount of film and TV work under his belt, Harrison Ford had already worked with George Lucas on American Graffiti. So Hamill’s thinking at first that Han Solo would be the main protagonist rather than Luke Starkiller, as he was originally known, makes sense. But like Hamill noted, A New Hope was meant to chronicle the rise of the wide-eyed farm boy into the hero who deals a devastating blow to the Empire, so of course Luke would be taking center stage.
That said, Han Solo does also go through his own hero transformation when he returns to help Luke out when Luke is about to blow up the Death Star, despite having already been paid for rescuing Princess Leia. But ultimately the Original Trilogy followed through keeping Luke as the focus, with Return of the Jedi ending with the character becoming a Jedi Knight. It’s interesting to think how those first three Star Wars movies would have unfolded if Han Solo was the main character, but I’m happy with what we got considering the franchise that spawned as a result.
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