Mark Hamill Invented a Brutal Backstory for Luke to Prep for The Last Jedi
Luke Skywalker was MIA throughout The Force Awakens until the very end, but clearly a great deal has happened to him since Return of the Jedi. We learned more about Leia and Han, who went on to have Ben, better known as Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who went from studying under Luke to becoming at least one of the reasons Luke went into exile. Ben/Ren’s plunge into the Dark Side was likely one reason Luke and Leia, who eventually became a General, parted ways. Han returned to smuggling, and, as you’re well aware, paid the ultimate price in an effort to win Ben back over to the good side of the Force. At the end of The Force Awakens, Rey found Luke on Ahch-To, sporting a beard and the look of a man who hasn’t spoken to anybody in a long time. We left the two of them there on a rocky outcropping, Luke unaware of everything that happened in the intervening years to his friends. In turn, we don’t know what happened to him.
The Last Jedi is expected to answer some of those questions for us, but that didn’t stop Mark Hamill from filling in the blanks on his own. In a state of self-exile, Luke has a number of lost years that Hamill had to account for in order to get into the right mindset for filming. To capture the right emotions, he invented a heartbreaking backstory about Luke’s troubled past.
Entertainment Weekly has been covering The Last Jedi extensively, and its in their pages where Hamill shared the bleak history he envisioned. “I made notes that he fell in love with a woman who was a widow and had this young child,” Hamill said. “He left the Jedi to raise this young child and marry this woman. And the child got hold of a lightsaber and accidentally killed himself.”
Yeah, that’s heartbreaking, Mr. Hamill.
“It’s nothing to do with the story, but when I think about gun violence and you read these tragic stories of kids getting hold of their parents’ guns and killing a sibling or themselves, I mean, I had to go to really dark places to get where Luke needed to be for this story,” he told EW.
There have been some really troubling storylines in Star Wars, but Hamill’s theory may be the most tragic of all. We are unlikely to ever see a Luke love story play out on screen, but we definitely have some more sympathy for him considering what he may have gone through. We do expect to get some answers about Luke’s recent history when The Last Jedi premieres December 15, but we’ll likely never know exactly what Luke has gone through in the thirty years between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. One can only hope that in however long he has left, he’ll find some peace and closure to the epic saga he’s been at the very center of.
Featured Image: Mark Hamill in Star Wars: The Last Jedi Courtesy: Disney/Lucasfilm
