While the 2012 announcement of a seventh Star Wars movie might have come as a surprise to most, there was one person for whom the biggest surprise was the timing. Mark Hamill, it turns out, had been expecting such a movie for close to three decades at that point.
Video of an interview with the original trilogy’s Luke Skywalker from 1983, promoting Return of the Jedi was pointed out by Reddit user Dessel this weekend, showing that George Lucas was apparently thinking of the future of his galaxy far, far away long before his prequel trilogy.”
“He at one time asked, ‘would you consider playing an Obi-Wan-type character handing Excalibur down to the next generation?’” Hamill said, apparently mixing his Star Wars and Arthurian mythologies even more than usual (Alternatively, Luke’s lightsaber had a name and no-one ever knew). “I said, ‘When would that be?’ and at the time he said, ‘Aww, around 2011.’”
Hamill said that that date was enough to keep him from committing to the project. “I thought, ‘gee, as much as I’d like to have a job lined up at the turn of the century,’ I was figuring out how old I’d be at that point and I thought, I don’t know.”
I’m not sure which is more surprising: that Lucas (or Hamill, depending on the story’s veracity) was so close with the timing for a follow-up to Return of the Jedi, or that Lucas might have really had planned out some thoughts that later became Star Wars: The Force Awakens so long ago.
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