Mark Interviews 1980+

The Mark Hamill Story: It's Tough Being A Good Guy

Good guys can't always get good roles. After the huge successes of STAR WARS and The Empire Strikes Back, Mark Hamill is having trouble breaking away from his "squeaky-clean image."

What frustrates Mark is that he often doesn't get a chance to read for an interesting part. Although he has done everything from TV (with 140 roles to his credit) to theater to cartoon voiceovers in his ten years as an actor, some producers and directors rule him out for roles. Either they see him as Luke Skywalker only, or he looks too young, or they assume that his asking price for the part will be too high.

A lot of the scripts sent to him are all-star disaster movies and Smokey and the Bandit or BJ and the Bear ripoffs -- "just me, a truck, an animal, and lots of babes in halter tops."

When Breaking Away came around," Hamill says, "I thought, 'Wow, would I love to do this -- a nice, small movie.' I thought it was going to be terrific. For me, as an actor, I would have liked to have done that part. Well, (former Twentieth Century Fox President) Alan Ladd didn't want me to do it because he felt it was more important to get someone that you could immediately say, 'That's a kid from high school,' and not 'That's the kid from STAR WARS.'"

Perhaps the only drawback he encountered after the success of the STAR WARS films was that "when you reach a wider audience, then you're really categorized. It becomes more a matter of perseverance."

The pressure of Empire duplicating the financial success of STAR WARS is of minor importance to Hamill, who will soon be 29 years old. He's more interested in the space epic as just legend and fairy tale -- "keeping people on the edge of their seats as to what happens next" -- than trying to equal the first one at the box office.

"I wanted the second one to justify it going on as a series. One thing that we had that a lot of people don't have is that we always intended the STAR WARS saga to be more than one film. This one was much more terra firma, with the action and relationships on the ground. You can get fed up with dogfights in outer space.".

Hamill probably had little difficulty understanding the intergalactic exploits of Luke Skywalker, for, as a youth, he was an interstate and intercontinental Navy brat. Born in Oakland, California, his father, Bill, a retired Naval officer, was constantly traveling. Mark wound up finishing high school in Yokosuka, Japan. The following year, he enrolled in Los Angeles City College, majoring in theater arts.

"When I was in college, and when I did community, amateur, and semi-professional theater," he recalls, "I never did get the juvenile lead. I always had blacked-out teeth and wore funny wigs. I did a lot of physical comedy, playing old, lecherous men in wheelchairs and French bedroom farces."

An appearance on The Bill Cosby Show in 1970 led to more TV roles, including a nine-month stint on ABC's General Hospital. In 1974, Hamill landed a starring role on ABC's The Texas Wheelers, an earthy comedy about four motherless children and their cantankerous father.

After filming STAR WARS, he was scheduled to do Corvette Summer, a slightly inane and underpromoted film about an auto mechanic trying to retrieve a stolen car. Six months prior to the shooting, he had a serious auto accident in which he broke his nose. The more times the story of the accident was retold, the more serious the incident became. Newspapers erroneously reported that Mark needed plastic surgery to reconstruct his face.

Hamill almost didn't do Corvette Summer for another reason. "When I talked to the producers, they said, 'We can't offer you such and such.' That's not what I was looking for -- I was looking for a good part. Even though they know George Lucas, who'd tell them a little about me, they still didn't want to even approach somebody who they thought was going to charge more than they had to spend."

The film that may help Hamill change his image is The Big Red One, scheduled to be released this summer. Filmed in Israel and Ireland, co-starring Lee Marvin, Big Red One is the story of the U.S. First Infantry Division (in which director Sam Fuller was a corporal), which made the first World War II landings in North Africa and Sicily.

The film was enthusiastically received by audiences at the Cannes Film Festival in France earlier this year.

"When I read the script," Hamill recalls, "I thought Lee was just perfect for the part. I'm a fan of Lee Marvin, but he seemed to be one of those overpowering personalities that I'd probably be intimidated by. I found Lee to be one of the nicest and fairest people, however. He's got a great perspective on himself. He's not afraid to tell you that he was the twenty-second choice for Cat Ballou."

In future films, Hamill would love a director "to take my squeaky-clean image and put me in something that is provocative, either sexually or otherwise --- something that would take the audience's preconceived notions of what they think they're going to see and mangle it."

"I would dearly love to do Broadway or any play. That's a goal of mine, but I haven't made any plans. I mean, who can? You just go along and see how things happen."

One thing is certain -- Mark will return for the third STAR WARS film. "Supposedly, George Lucas will turn in the script, Revenge of the Jedi, at the beginning of next year, and then they'll decide whether we go to work the middle of next year or the beginning of 1982. It will come out in 1983."

"When I do the next one, that's the end of that story line. Then they go back 20 years and tell the first three stories. It goes on to totally different characters -- I'm not even born yet. I think that in the third one I'm a little boy, so I'll be played by somebody else."

Will he be left orbiting in the limbo of forgotten actors? "At this point," Hamill laughs, "I don't know. I just hope it's not the be-all and end-all of my career."

Unknown, 1980