Mark Hamill has finally ruled out a return as Luke Skywalker. Can Star Wars survive without him?
Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker has been Star Wars' ultimate backup plan for at least half a decade. The original trilogy has faded into the distance, and the movies set in that galaxy far, far away have become so poor in recent years that we'd all rather watch Andor. But there was always the option of plugging in Hamill – a sort of human Star Wars USB stick, primed to conjure up 1970s vibes as required. Not quite getting your fill of Force nostalgia? Here's Luke tutoring Baby Yoda in The Book of Boba Fett. And here he is again, whinging about past mistakes in The Last Jedi. It may not quite have been Binary Sunset, or Yoda lifting the X-wing on Dagobah. But for a few shimmering, quite-possibly-digitally-retouched moments, it felt like we were back in the real Star Wars again.
Back in 2023, I wrote about the weird emotional whiplash of falling for digi-Luke: the plasticky but strangely compelling CGI version of the Jedi master who turned up in those Disney+ TV shows like a hologram from a smoother-skinned age. At the time, Hamill had sounded lukewarm on returning to Star Wars, but left just enough ambiguity to keep the dream alive.
That was all before this week's revelation, in an interview with ComicBook.com, that Hamill has definitively closed the book on ever playing Skywalker again. Not even as a Force Ghost – the role he had been tipped to play in the forthcoming, utterly dreadful sounding Daisy Ridley-led film about a new Jedi order. 'And by the way, when I disappeared in [The Last Jedi], I left my robes behind. And there's no way I'm gonna appear as a naked Force ghost,' said Hamill. He added: 'I had my time. I'm appreciative of that, but I really think they should focus on the future and all the new characters.'
And you might think: fair enough. After nearly 50 years in and around a franchise that has de-aged, re-aged and resurrected him more times than Emperor Palpatine, the man has earned the right to float off into the Force unbothered. Hamill is now 73, and there comes a time in every Jedi's life when they must hang up their lightsaber, and hope that the studio doesn't resurrect them as a digital sock puppet 30 years later. For the man who will for ever be thought of as Luke Skywalker, that moment is now – and judging by his tone, not a moment too soon.
I am not even secretly hoping for more. After all, that episode of The Mandalorian – you know the one – hinted at a whole new chapter. For a brief moment, it felt like Star Wars might finally fill in the blank pages of Luke's life between blowing up Death Stars and milking alien sea cows. Perhaps we'd get Star Wars: Jedi Academy, a kind of intergalactic Dead Poets Society. Maybe it would be terrible. Maybe it would be magnificent. Either way, it would have been something. But without Hamill, the grand plan of stitching together the post-Imperial timeline starts to wobble.
Because the truth is, Skywalker had become the Mando-verse's narrative gaffer tape, holding together a sprawling mess of side quests, animated spin-offs and character revivals. Whenever things got too niche, in came Luke.
His absence leaves a big, Jedi-shaped hole. You can't exactly call up Rey for a cameo in the Mando-timeline (she would still be a child, and the jury is decidedly out on whether Star Wars fans will even want to see her again after the debacle that was Rise of Skywalker). Leia and Obi-Wan have joined the blue-glow retirement club. Yoda has been replaced by a mini-me. Anakin long since turned to the dark side and died in the arms of a man he'd spent three films trying to kill. Luke's departure leaves us lost in space, drifting in cosmic purgatory, wondering what the future might hold now the franchise has burned through its last original-trilogy safety net.
It's a strange place to be for long-term fans of the saga, yet finally we may be able to set ourselves on a new course. If it's one that is miraculously free of Death Stars, Palpatine clones and even sand, we might one day find ourselves thanking Hamill for making a decision we should probably all have made peace with long, long ago.
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