Mark Interviews 2000+

A few words from Mark Hamill

A genre icon for his pivotal role in the STAR WARS saga, Mark Hamill is also a leading light in the animation world as the voice of characters such as the Joker and the Skeleton King! Here he talks to Judy Sloane.

In 1973, three years before George Lucas chose Mark Hamill to portray the iconic Luke Skywalker in STAR WARS, the actor was cast in his first voice-over role, as the young astronaut, Tony Nelson, in the animated series of the popular sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. "I was the teenage version of Tony," he recalls, "Later I got to work with Larry Hagman and I told him I was his teenage self! I enjoyed doing it enormously but I didn't work in animation again for 20 years - I had so much on my plate it didn't occur to me, and I didn't really pursue it."

It wasn't until he heard that there was to be an animated series of Batman that he became interested in that aspect of the business again, but his interest lay in being a writer on the show, as he explains, "With 65 episodes I was thinking that they were going to go beyond the villain of the week, they might attack a wide range of subject matter that they did in the comics, which I knew quite well as a kid. So I went in and they said, 'No, no, you're not here for writing, we have our writers, we were just wondering whether you'd perform on one'. I said, 'Sure,' and I played the guy who pushed Mr. Freeze into the solution, who creates Mr. Freeze - the villain behind the villain. Then a month later they wanted to have me come in and audition for the Joker. And if I knew what I know now, maybe I would have been intimidated, because you're up against just fabulous actors with incredible range and versatility. But I didn't really think of it as a real job opportunity, I just looked at it as a lark."

Showing Hamill a drawing of the Joker, he was able to create a unique embodiment of the character just through using his voice. "One thing that helped me was in the audition page it said, 'Dont think Nicholson'. I said, 'What a relief!' He really put his stamp on it in a way that was very impressive, as did Caesar Romero, but I thought this cleared the slate for me to do it."

It's widely believed that Hamill used such diverse personalities as Hannibal Lecter and Jerry Lewis as his inspiration for the role. "I'm sure Jerry Lewis and Hannibal Lecter crept in there somewhere," he laughs. "I this case, he had all these massive teeth, and it really put me in mind of the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine, so I wanted to have a little of that feel to him. There are an absurd range of influences. The Joker was unusual because he has such a history, and you have to live up to all these people's ideas of what it would be. And mind you, it's a cartoon, he can't be homicidal like he is in the comic books. When they said, 'You've got the part'. That's when the doubt kicked in, because I thought, 'I know how obsessive fans are, and when it gets out that Luke Skywalker is doing the Joker, it's going to blow their minds. They are going to be predisposed to hate me. I would almost rather not take billing to make the character organic."

Usually when doing voice work, actors are isolated in a sound booth, where they say the dialogue over and over with different inflections. But Hamill discovered that doing Batman was a totally different experience. "It was done like a radio play. We had the entire cast and we'd read it in continuity. I was really spoiled by Batman, because not only was the writing really good, but everyone was so easy to work with. And it was cast like a network series, we had wonderful actors. I feel like I missed out on something, missing out on radio, because you get to play such a broad range of roles because people are only listening to how you shape it with your vocal inflections. They don't care what you look like, which was wonderful for me. Otherwise, I wouldn't be the Joker, would I? If you think I'm too short for a stormtrooper, I'm too short for the Joker as well!"

His success as the Joker led to other villainous roles - Hobgoblin on Spider-Man, Gargoyle in The Incredible Hulk, Maximus on The Fantastic Four, and Dr. Jack on The Phantom - which naturally leads to the question, has he finally turned to the Dark Side? "It's interesting because people complain, 'Oh, I'm typecast,' here I can go 180 degrees from the iconic valor of a Luke Skywalker to one of the villainous icons of all time. I think the Joker outranks Lex Luthor in terms of being the iconic symbol of evil in this one mythos. So it was almost to my delight that I got typed as a villain, because they're not in every episode, when they show up you're glad, and you get to really create chaos for the protagonists.

Adding a new villain to his list, Hamill is currently portraying the evil Skeleton King on the animated series Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!. "I love it because it's like another generation's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, because it's epic in scope. It's got tremendous energy and action, and I think kids really need an escape, they turn on the news and there are bombs going off, and it's a terrible world history going on, especially for little ones."

"The Skeleton King is wonderfully larger-than-life," Hamill continues, "and there's something really satisfying about him. It's like children's theatre, you are unequivocally the bad guy, you look bad, you have bad thoughts, you talk badly, everything about you is evil. But he has great power, and I've enjoyed this experience so much, because my finger's in the mix, but I'm not doing a lot of heavy lifting. It seems like at this time in life this is a nice fit for me. With animation you're probably never going to be recognized unless people freeze-frame the credits. What I've always said about animation is it is liberating beyond words to be able to do characters that you'd be self-conscious about doing if they could see you on camera."

Perhaps one of the most difficult roles Hamill ever had to play was himself on a classic episode of The Simpsons which had the actor making an appearance at a Science Fiction convention. "When they sent me the script I got on my high horse, and I said, 'How dare they! I've never appeared in my Luke costume for money! I've been on Broadway, I've got a Drama Desk Nomination.' My kids were like, 'Dad, get over yourself, it's The Simpsons!' I went, 'Oh, yeah!' So, of course, I had to do it. But after doing character voices, how do I make it sound like me? What do I sound like? It's weird. I was at a convention in the cartoon, and I went up in front of this huge audience and said, 'Yes, I'm here for STAR WARS, but I'm also here to talk about Sprint,' and I went into a commercial for long distance. And a nerd in the audience goes, 'Oh, talk about STAR WARS.' And Homer was like, 'Shut up you nerd, he's trying to save you money on long distance phone calls!' I was in heaven. I've adored that show before it was a show, when it was on The Tracey Ullman Show."

With the final instalment of STAR WARS opening earlier this year, the conversation turned to the abiding success of Science Fiction, which never seems to lose its audience. "Sci-Fi is something movies do best," the actor acknowledges, "it's hard to do it on stage with the effects that you need, and people always love stories of the fantastic and things that engage their imagination. But for a long time comic book themes were out, and it was the lasting stigma of the Batman TV series. It was really much more legitimate than a lot of fans want to admit. If you look at it written on the page, they were acting out the comic books in a way that really accentuated the absurdity of it all. They took the comedic thing much too far. And I think if they hadn't fallen into formula so quickly it would have run four or five years. Now that the technology has caught up to where they're able to do Spider-Man justice, the sky's the limit."

Starburst, December 21, 2005