(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Mon 8 September 2025 20:15, UK
When you’ve been acting in films and TV for well over 50 years, it’s probably understandable if you don’t remember some of the details of one or two things you worked on. To forget you were ever in a movie altogether is something else, though, and that’s what happened to Luke Skywalker himself, Mr Mark Hamill.
Now, to give him some credit, the film we’re talking about is a much-forgotten and even less loved Stephen King adaptation named Sleepwalkers from 1992, a movie that picks up a whopping 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and featured a lot of actors not many people have heard of, with the exception of Ron Perlman from Hellboy.
And to give Hamill even more credit (or rather none at all, given he was uncredited), he only played a tiny role in the vampire flick, appearing on screen for fractionally less time than King himself, who turned up in it as a creepy caretaker.
About his involvement in the film, Hamill told Entertainment Weekly: “I totally forgot (about it). If I remember right, Mick Garris, the director, asked me, ‘Could I do a small role?’ I loved him so much, and I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do it to help him.’ I don’t even know if I got paid, but I totally forgot about it.
To be fair to everyone involved with Sleepwalkers, it’s unlikely anyone was really operating at their creative peak, to be generous. King was coming off the back of a decade of massive cocaine and alcohol use, and Hamill had struggled to find work in the ten years or so since he’d last strapped on a lightsabre in Return of the Jedi, with directors aware that he would simply be unmistakable from his global fame as Skywalker.
Sleepwalkers was also not originally a Stephen King book, which may well have saved it to some degree. But King wrote it straight to screenplay, the storyline involving a rather laughable tale of two vampire shapeshifters who roam the earth, or rather Los Angeles, looking for human female virgins to feast on.
Rather surprisingly, Garris says he was approached about a sequel, however, with King’s wife Tabitha to write the movie, but that never came to pass. It seems not only did Hamill’s character not even get a credit on the first one, he also didn’t get invited to the premiere, mainly because they didn’t even hold one. And regardless, it’s unlikely he would have known much about it, as he admitted: “I don’t remember the plot; I don’t remember who I played. I should probably look it up,”
Hamill of course did have a big career renaissance as a veteran Skywalker, returning for the J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Wars trilogy that came to a conclusion in 2019, and again for the Disney series The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian.
Just to show there are no hard feelings, he’s now about to star in another Stephen King adaptation, this time The Long Walk – a kind of Hunger Games affair where errant young teens are made to walk and walk until they can walk no more, each one being dispatched with a shotgun if they have the temerity to stop. Originally published as a novel back in 1979, King published it under his pen name of Richard Bachman, and it was, in fact, the first book he ever wrote while he was studying at the University of Maine in the late 1960s.
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