Mark Hamill Shares What Might Be the First Photo Ever Taken of Luke Skywalker
By Emma Stefansky. Photos: Courtesy of Lucasfilm, Twitter.
It’s no secret that George Lucas’s Star Wars changed the game for science fiction, and for Hollywood movies in general, but none of the cast and crew had any idea what a phenomenon it would become. It turned Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher into massive stars, and launched a franchise that has continued to add new movies to the series to this day. Before all that, however, it was just this odd little movie shooting scenes with bizarre dialogue in the middle of the African desert.
Mark Hamill, perhaps the only one of the cast to bask in his lifetime of nerd royalty (he has Star Wars and Batman to thank for that), enjoys sharing the occasional blast from the past photo on his Twitter from time to time, and on Saturday posted what might very well be the first picture ever taken of his character Luke Skywalker in costume.
(The “robot auction” he‘s talking about is the scene where Luke buys R2-D2 and C-3PO from the Jawas.)
Hamill also had a funny response when one of his followers asked whether he’s squinting in the photo because he was tired or if he knew Star Wars was going to be big.
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A lot of the crew involved in the movie were unsure about how it’d be received, and even some of the cast were taken aback at the weird script. Alec Guinness, also known as Jedi master Obi-Wan Kenobi, famously referred to Star Wars as “fairy-tale rubbish” in one of his letters, published in his biography Alec Guinness: The Official Biography (via Business Insider):
I have been offered a movie (20th Cent. Fox) which I may accept, if they come up with proper money. London and N. Africa, starting in mid-March. Science fiction—which gives me pause—but is to be directed by Paul [sic] Lucas who did American Graffiti, which makes me feel I should. Big part. Fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting perhaps.
Star Wars, of course, defied all expectations to become the blockbuster franchise it is today, leaving behind relics like this photo: young, squinty-eyed Hamill, like Luke, standing on the cusp of the unknown, with no idea how enormous a universe he was about to step into.
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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