The following is an excerpt from the Star Wars Insider Magazine Special Edition, on sale now!
Interview with Mark Hamill
On being Luke Skywalker:
"I would have much rather played the robot [C-3PO] or Han Solo than Luke! Luke is the bland audience surrogate -- he's not extraordinarily talented or physically imposing. That's the whole point. It's to appeal to that 10-year-old who'll go, 'Oh I could do that!' It's almost like the way Robin was added to Batman, to make it more accessible to the target audience. When I went for the screen test, I felt for sure that Han Solo was the lead character, like Buck Rogers, and I was the sidekick kid. It can't be the other way around -- why would the kid be the protagonist? Even the marketing people couldn't live with it. You see Luke on the posters and they decided to give him this massive chest. It's not me. Finally, after it was hugely popular, then they got comfortable enough to make a poster where Luke looked like me. Isn't that funny? It had to make $60 million before I finally got the part!"
On Sir Alec Guinness:
"He was the one that took me out to lunch and got me over being so tongue-tied. He wouldn't let me call him Sir Alec. He said (in Alec Guinness voice), 'I want to be known by my name, not my accolades.' I said, 'Well, what do you want me to call you? Big Al?!' When I relaxed I could use my humor, which is sort of irreverent. All I wanted to talk about was The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit... 'No, I want to hear about your career,' he said. I replied: 'What do you want to hear about first? The soap opera or the dog food commercial?' I had much more work than that, but that was my way of making the point that [the extent of] my career was just ridiculous compared to his."
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