Mark Interviews 1990+

Where are They Now? - Mark Hamill

Mark Hamill seems right at home. He's wearing space-age clothing and is surrounded by movie cameras and make-up artists. But the former STAR WARS star is not making a movie on this Hollywood soundstage. He is making a CD-ROM game.

From 1977 to 1983, Hamill was famous as Luke Skywalker in the three blockbuster STAR WARS films. Now Hamill, a boyish 43-year-old with short blond hair, is back in space. In the last few years, computers have advanced so quickly that CD-ROM games have evolved from animated programs to live-action adventures with story lines and identifiable characters.

Hamill is one of many Hollywood actors who have become pioneers in this type of production. "It's great fun," Hamill says, but admits it's also a great deal of work. He spent much of the summer on the set of Wing Commander IV, the second CD-ROM game in the popular series. He stars along with several other well-known actors, including Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) and Tom Wilson (Back To The Future). The games are made like action pictures, except that each scene is shot in several ways, so that the players can choose how the characters will react on each mission.

Finanically, the CD-ROM games may turn out to be even more lucrative for Hamill than his films, because he earns a percentage of the profit on the games. Wing Commander III has already sold half a million copies, and Wing IV is expected to do even better.

The STAR WARS films made Hamill famous, but by the time the last film, Return of the Jedi, was completed in 1983, he had left Hollywood fo the New York theater. Hamill hoped to lose the goody-goody image that was getting him typecast in films. While the money wasn't as good, he found success on Broadway and spent seven years there, appearing in plays such as Amadeus and The Elephant Man.

His life as a theater actor was also better for his young family. He kept regular hours and could spend time with his wife, Marilou, and their three children. But Hamill finally returned to Southern California to keep his name in the minds of Hollywood bosses. He still has an apartment in New York.

Since his return, Hamill has played in several films, most recently in the 1995 remake of the 1960 classic Village of the Damned. Because one of his favorite hobbies is collecting comic books, he has turned to writing comics and doing voice-overs for cartoons, a market in which he has had a lot of successes recently. Hamill is the voice of the Joker in a Batman cartoon series, among others.

Even as a child, Hamill says, he wanted a film career. "I had a friend who had a doll house," he explains. "We would make movie sets out of it - she'd do the inside, and I'd do the outside."

Hamill is the middle child of seven children. His father was a navy man, so he's lived all over the US and even attended school in Japan. He is the only sibling to go into the movie business.

Hamill remains close to his family. He believes his survival in the film business and the success of his own marriage, which has lasted over 16 years, are partly due to the strength of his own upbringing, "I saw my family as an emotional anchor," Hamill told Spotlight. "I didn't take it lightly."

He met his wife during a visit to his dentist - she was a dental hygienist.

"Once you get out of the intense, romantic part of a relationship, instead of getting together, a lot of people grow apart," he says. "People get married in the heat of the moment. I felt that rush [in the beginning of the relationship], but we didn't get married right away."

Mark and Marilou married at the height of Hamill's fame, after STAR WARS became a smash hit and just before The Empire Strikes Back appeared in 1980. They have a daughter, now seven, and two sons, aged 12 and 16.

The family travels together on location whenever possible. Recently, when he did some episodes of the TV series SeaQuest in Florida, his family came along, and the kids "had a blast," Hamill says.

When he's not filming or working on his writing projects, Hamill admits, he is "a major O.J. junkie". He's been following the murder trial of the former football star and actor O.J. Simpson, videotaping each day of testimony in his dressing room.

"I followed the Tonya [Harding] and Nancy [Kerrigan] thing, Michael Jackson and the Clarence Thomas [a Supreme Court justice accused of sexual harrassmet] hearings. I overload on this kind of input," Hamill smiles.

Now he wants to create a project similar to one produced by his STAR WARS co-star Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia). Fisher wrote a book called Postcards from the Edge, which was turned into a film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. Hamill and his cousin, Eric Johnson, have written a story that is being turned into a comic book series. He hopes the story will also be filmed. "I want to take everything I've learned," Hamill says, "and write and direct a project of my own..."

Spotlight, 1995