Star Wars: The Last Jedi has a lot of explaining to do when it comes to Luke Skywalker, but Mark Hamill is trying to calm those worries.
With Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Luke Skywalker is, for perhaps the first time ever, an actual question in Star Wars, and it seems that Mark Hamill is very cognizant of that, just like everyone else. (At least we seem to know whether or not he’ll leave the planet, so that’s one problem solved.) This comes from a new chat he had with Disney Insider (and coming to us via Star Wars News Net).
For the most part, it’s a pretty bog-standard interview — praise for Rian Johnson, talking about the legacy of Star Wars and a promise that there are “jaw-dropping surprises, but you’ll just have to see the film itself to discover what they are,” which we vaguely suspected anyway.
Here’s perhaps the most important sentences of them all from Hamill:
"But [Luke] hasn’t gone to the dark side. This isn’t an evil version of him. But it’s still an incarnation of the character I never expected."
As SWNN also notes, this is rather clear-cut and is also coming straight from Disney. In other words, this plot point isn’t even that big of a concern to both Disney and Lucasfilm — it’s something that can just be dropped out there, unlike Adam Driver’s still-cryptic discussion of a “princess” or even the marketing for The Last Jedi in general, which, as Buckie Wells has already pointed out, has been fairly opaque about some fundamentals.
Next: Solo: A Star Wars Story is already trying to calm fans down
Dare we say that this also suggests Luke will make it to Episode IX? Given Hamill’s words about Luke having “lost confidence,” it almost seems like the natural progression would be to give him that confidence back, which seems like a more-than-one-movie type situation. Granted, it seems fairly likely that Luke survives anyway, given Hamill talking about it more than a year ago, but that kind of arc just seems like it’d take time to complete. While SWNN talks about Rey as a key part, we’re not going to discount the possibility that other characters may play a role, too, and to see Hamill do some serious acting — which could reconcile the Johnson comments as well.
As we get closer to The Last Jedi, how do you feel about what’s being said and what isn’t by the stars?