{"id":93334,"date":"2025-07-26T05:53:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T05:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/93334\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T05:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T05:53:10","slug":"mark-hamill-almost-retired-from-acting-around-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/93334\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Hamill Almost Retired From Acting Around 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe first 22 minutes of the Stephen King<\/a> adaptation \u201cThe Long Walk<\/a>\u201d debuted at San Diego Comic-Con<\/a> on Friday, following the debut of the new red-band trailer and a panel featuring the cast, including Mark Hamill<\/a>, David Jonsson (\u201cAlien: Romulus\u201d), Tut Nyuot (\u201cSmall Axe: Red, White and Blue\u201d) and Garrett Wareing (\u201cManifest\u201d).<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film is adapted from King\u2019s 1979 novel (first written when he was 19!), set in an authoritarian America in which 50 young adult men join a televised contest to walk continuously at a pace of at least three miles per hour \u2014 or they\u2019ll be killed. Hamill plays a man only known as the Major, the military commander who oversees the Walk and gives the walkers their literal marching orders. In the panel, Hamill said that when director Francis Lawrence approached him about playing the part, it immediately evoked his teenage years in Japan, where he went to school next to a U.S. military base.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI said, \u2018I know who this guy is: I\u2019ve seen him firsthand,\u2019\u201d Hamill said. \u201cI\u2019d walk across the parking lot, seeing the officers putting these guys through their paces in blazing hot sun, and they were just brutal. Like if you vomit, they force you to eat it. It\u2019s horrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe role is the latest in a series of darker, more complicated roles for the man indelibly known as \u201cStar Wars\u201d hero Luke Skywalker. The actor said that around 2019, he decided he wanted to step away from acting on camera.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI thought this stage in my career, I\u2019d be spending more time with a metal detector, wandering around the beach, playing with the dogs in the backyard,\u201d Hamill said. \u201cI said to my agent, \u2018You know what? I\u2019m not motivated anymore. I think I\u2019m gonna just sort of retire and just do voice over.\u2019 And the only people that rejected were my agent and my wife, because, you know, it\u2019s good to have me out of the house.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe credited filmmaker Mike Flanagan for reviving his career by casting him in his Netflix series \u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher.\u201d \u201cThat would have been a routine character for voice over, but to play an amoral, sociopathic lawyer, just pure evil \u2014 never on camera,\u201d he said. Flanagan then cast Hamill as an alcoholic accountant and grandfather to the title character.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat a turnaround!\u201d he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t expect to be this busy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEarlier in the panel, screenwriter JT Mollner discussed how happy he was to keep the \u201cheavy, exciting, terrifying themes\u201d of King\u2019s novel. \u201cWe so wanted to make sure we had the beauty and love in the story of friendship \u2014 and also the brutality, hopelessness and terror,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m very very grateful that we could keep the teeth that the book has.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s as far as anyone in the panel addressed the film\u2019s parallels to the current dire state of American democracy. Instead, in a taped segment, Lawrence and \u201cLong Walk\u201d actor Ben Wang \u2014\u00a0currently in production on \u201cThe Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping\u201d \u2014\u00a0discussed how the grueling nature of the shoot,\u00a0in which the actors walked for miles on a Canadian highway, created a strong connection between the cast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe shot this movie chronologically,\u201d Lawrence said. \u201cSo as everybody got together and met for the first time [in the movie], you as actors were meeting for the first time and becoming friends, and then going on this experience together. The physicality of this job of walking sometimes 30,000 steps a day doing these very, very long takes, I think created a bond.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThen Lawrence surprised the crowd in Comic-Con by announcing that they were going to watch the opening act of the movie, which ran from when the lead character, played by Cooper Hoffman, arrives at the Walk and meets the other walkers, to the moment (teased in the trailer) that the first walker \u201cgets his ticket\u201d\u00a0\u2014 the Major\u2019s euphemism for getting killed.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe Long Walk\u201d will premiere on Sept. 12.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first 22 minutes of the Stephen King adaptation \u201cThe Long Walk\u201d debuted at San Diego Comic-Con on…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":93335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[185,15661,171,20427,12757,12758,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-93334","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-comic-con","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-mark-hamill","12":"tag-stephen-king","13":"tag-the-long-walk","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114917985773381722","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}