A fond farewell, then, to all that. The swishy lightsabers; the bullseyeing of womp rats and conveniently located Death Star kill buttons; the parental epiphany-fuelled screams of anguish. Mark Hamill has announced he is (probably) retiring as Luke Skywalker.
“I had my time, and that’s good. But that’s enough,” said Hamill during an interview with CBS Sunday Morning. “Well, you never say never. I just don’t see any reason to,” he added. “Let me put it that way: I mean, they have so many stories to tell, they don’t need Luke any more.”
What’s that you say? Didn’t Hamill retire at least twice before, or at least show no significant indication that he would return to the role of everyone’s favourite Tatooinian moisture farmer turned saviour of the known galaxy for at least a decade or so? Well, yes, there was a considerable period (between 1983 and 2015, to be precise) when Hamill’s Skywalker was very much out of the picture. He then returned, only to be killed off again in the critically acclaimed (though minority-trolled) The Last Jedi, as a middle-aged Luke, before unexpectedly turning up in cameos as a de-aged version of the Jedi Knight in the TV shows The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, to fan rapture.
There have even been recent reports that Hamill might be back as a Force ghost in the recently announced Daisy Ridley-led Star Wars film, alongside Hayden Christensen as his dear old dead dad, Anakin. And Hamill is a mischievous sort, so could easily be pulling our legs here. Even so, it seems a pity we won’t be getting to see Luke again, just as the technology seems to exist for further adventures alongside our favourite Jedi Master.
They say be careful what you wish for, and who knows if we’ll one day regret wishing for more CGI-assisted Luke adventures set in the era of The Mandalorian – just as AI experts will probably wonder why they kept programming computers to be more intelligent, right up to the moment when a brand-new superintelligence covers the entire planet with organic life-killing nanobots.
And yet, as a Star Wars fan, I do. Especially so as the realisation of de-aged Luke in that episode with baby Yoda was so wonderful that it is hard to imagine Disney/Lucasfilm not taking the whole concept further. An entire series, or new movie, starring Hamill as youngish Luke seems like a very logical next step from both a commercial and creative point of view for Star Wars. Or at the very least, digi-Luke could turn up as one of the key players in Dave Filoni’s proposed new film about the “escalating war between the Imperial remnant and the New Republic”.
That movie is being pitched as an Avengers-style cinematic event that will bring together Din Djarin, Ahsoka Tano, Boba Fett and other heroes from recent TV spin-offs set in the period between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so the appearance of Skywalker would appear to make total sense. It would also give Lucasfilm the opportunity to continue fleshing out the fiercely divisive radical personality shift that took place in Luke between his appearance as a confident young Jedi Master in the 1983 film and his turn as an anxiety-racked elder in The Last Jedi.
Instead we are getting the return of Daisy Ridley’s Rey, a character who passed through the sequel trilogy with all the gravitas of a Kowakian monkey-lizard who’s just realised Jabba the Hutt fancies eating him for dinner. I feel like teenage Luke himself after being told he can’t run off to join the Academy because he’s needed to farm moisture or pick up some power converters. It’s just not fair.
