Why Mark Hamill was initially Hesitant to Appear in Star Wars: The Force Awakens
While The Force Awakens revolved around the whereabouts of Luke Skywalker, who had disappeared for a number of years at that point, he only featured for all of sixty seconds at the end of the film.
J.J. Abrams has opened up about Mark Hamill's resistance to appearing in the film, while speaking at Tribeca. “We knew that getting to Luke was the whole story, and I was desperate to do the next chunk that we knew would not fit into this one movie. But, we knew that we had that ending, but it was a frightening and tricky thing to do, but at first and in all honesty, Mark Hamill was a little resistant.
Imagine reading ‘Star Wars,’ imagine being Mark Hamill and you get the script for the new Star Wars. ‘Oh the opening is good, page two, oh, three and so on – what the f**k is the going on, I’m three pages before the end, the last page, what?’ He was so kind to do it, and at first he was like, ‘Will it seem silly, will it be a joke that he is standing there?’ I said to him, ‘I don’t think it will.’ I said because the whole movie is about that, it could be a great fun drum roll, up to seeing this guy.”
Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan explained that early on in the script written by Michael Arndt, Luke appeared very early in the story. "“Early on I tried to write versions of the story where [Rey] is at home, her home is destroyed, and then she goes on the road and meets Luke.
"And then she goes and kicks the bad guy’s ass. It just never worked and I struggled with this. This was back in 2012. It just felt like every time Luke came in and entered the movie, he just took it over. Suddenly you didn’t care about your main character anymore because, ‘Oh f–k, Luke Skywalker’s here. I want to see what he’s going to do.’”
Source: Slashfilm
