He was always at my house, practically a third roommate. … I said, ‘I think you’re right for this, Mark.’” “On my couch when I got home was Mark Hamill. As Englund told The Hollywood Reporter years later, he had auditioned to play Han, snagging the script pages for Luke on the way out.
It was Hamill’s friend Robert Englund (who later became Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies) who mentioned the role of Luke Skywalker to him. In these early roles, Hamill came across as a clean-cut California surfer-kid - a bit of a dreamer and believably boyish. Everything we would later associate with Luke Skywalker was already in evidence. He attended Los Angeles City College for drama, working odd jobs and landing the occasional acting gig - first on General Hospital and then The Bill Cosby Show. “It’s still one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had on stage,” Hamill recalled, “made more meaningful because Charles Schulz was a big influence on me.” By that time, I was already really interested in the theatre and television and film and he’d take me along so that I could see a lot of shows.” By high school, when his family was stationed in Yokohama, Japan, he knew he wanted to act, succeeding in convincing his drama department to produce You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and to let him play Snoopy. “I moved around quite a bit and when I was in Virginia, he would take a lot of trips to New York. “My father was in the Navy,” he said in a 2015 interview. Hamill was born in Oakland, but he didn’t stay long.
But for Hamill - in the public’s mind, anyway - it became his permanent residence. Everyone else moved on from that galaxy far, far away. As a result, he’s been the franchise’s unofficial caretaker. The 66-year-old actor has done other good work, but of the original trilogy’s main stars - including the late Carrie Fisher - none of them is as intimately connected to Star Wars as Hamill is. Meanwhile, Mark Hamill has never matched the celebrity he enjoyed as Luke. Harrison Ford earned superstardom thanks to Han but remained a box-office draw in plenty of subsequent movies. Plus, there’s the matter of the actors who played them. Han is the bad boy, while Luke is the nice guy.
Han is the more magnetic, daring, swashbuckling hero - he gets the girl and cracks a lot of jokes - while Luke is the more earnest, sensitive one. If you asked most people which Star Wars character they preferred - Luke Skywalker or Han Solo - I imagine the majority would go with Han.
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