Mark Hamill has revealed that he came up with Luke Skywalker's backstory for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Now, he doesn't mean that he went back to his Tatooine days, but rather what has happened to Luke between the end of Return of the Jedi and meeting him again at the end of The Force Awakens with that whole "time for the Jedi to end" thing.
"There's just decades of history that's unknown. So I was wondering how they're going to handle all this. Now, obviously, with Force Awakens, JJ [Abrams] had a full plate. It was inevitable that they would push me down the line," Hamill told The AP.
"In this new one, I was saying to Rian Johnson, 'I need to know my backstory'. It was kind of unclear. You read where he is now and what he's doing now and sort of have to fill in the blanks for yourself.
"So I did do a backstory myself. It's not about Luke anymore, so it's not really important. But I had to make sense of it for myself. What Rian came up with, I was stunned."
This week, a new image of Luke in The Last Jedi emerged that shows him as the grizzled, tortured Jedi master that he has become, following on from Hamill teasing that Luke is a bitter and broken man when we meet him again.
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"The fact that Luke says, 'I only know one truth. It's time for the Jedi to end…' I mean, that's a pretty amazing statement for someone who was the symbol of hope and optimism in the original films," he explained.
We'll have to see just what's happened to the Luke we knew when Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in UK cinemas on December 14 and US cinemas on December 15.
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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
