It’s been nearly seven years since The Last Jedi turned Luke Skywalker into a polarizing figure, and nearly as long since fans started speculating about behind-the-scenes tension between longtime Star Wars actor Mark Hamill and director Rian Johnson. Now, Hamill is setting the record straight.
In a new interview on the Bullseye with Jesse Thorn podcast, Hamill openly reflected on his early comments about Johnson’s version of Luke and expressed regret over how his words were taken.
“The fact that I went public with my dissatisfaction with the motivation for Luke becoming a suicidal hermit might have colored things in a way that, maybe, I should have kept that to myself,” Hamill admitted.
He continued, “Rian Johnson is one of the most gifted directors I’ve ever worked with.”
That statement alone might shock fans who’ve spent years turning Hamill into an unwilling symbol of resistance against The Last Jedi. If you take a closer look, though, the real story here is one of artistic disagreement, not personal animosity.
During the original press tour for The Last Jedi, Hamill famously said he viewed Johnson’s Luke Skywalker as “another character” entirely from the young man he portrayed during the original trilogy years.
He questioned the idea that Luke would choose exile in the wake of Ben Solo’s fall to the dark side, saying, “Jedis don’t give up. I mean, even if he had a problem, he would maybe take a year to try and regroup… but if he made a mistake, he would try and right that wrong.”
It’s a take that resonated deeply with fans who saw Luke as the eternal optimist, the boy who threw down his lightsaber rather than kill Darth Vader, the pilot who risked it all to take down the Death Star. In Hamill’s mind, surviving loss should have made Luke stronger, not broken.
But even then, Hamill made it clear that this was Johnson’s story to tell, “It’s somebody else’s story, and Rian needed me to be a certain way to make the ending effective.”
That’s a level of professional grace often overlooked in social media discourse. Hamill disagreed, but he committed to the project and to the character he’s played for nearly five decades of his life.
“Despite the fact that I disagree with your choices for Luke,” he told Johnson, “I’m going to do everything within my power to make your screenplay work as best as I can.”
The Luke Skywalker backstory we never saw
One of the most fascinating parts of Hamill’s recent interview, as shared by The Independent, is his admission that he built his own internal justification for Luke’s isolation on Ach-To because the script didn’t offer one that felt emotionally true to who he knew Luke the character to be.
And his imagined backstory is devastating.
“I thought, ‘What could make someone give up a devotion to what is basically a religious entity, to give up being a Jedi?’ Well, the love of a woman. They have a child together. At some point, the child, as a toddler, picks up an unattended lightsaber, pushes the button, and is killed instantly. The wife is so full of grief, she kills herself.”
It’s a heartbreaking hypothetical scenario that Hamill crafted to help ground his performance in TLJ.
“That resonated with me so deeply,” he said. “I hear these horrible stories about children who find unattended guns and wind up dead.”
Johnson reportedly told him, “Yeah, do whatever you want,” when Hamill asked if he could create his own reasoning.
It’s not canon, but it is revealing.
For years, fans have run with the idea that Hamill hated The Last Jedi or that he resented Johnson. But that narrative doesn’t hold up in light of this new interview.
Hamill is a thoughtful actor who cares deeply about the character he’s played since 1977, and someone who took the job seriously, even when he didn’t fully agree with the creative direction his director wanted to take.
“The only thing unfortunate about that,” he said, “is, I’ve heard comments from fans who think that I somehow dislike Rian Johnson, and nothing could be further from the truth.”
So no, to clear the air, Mark Hamill and Rian Johnson weren’t feuding. They were doing something far more difficult, frankly. They were collaborating across a creative divide. If The Last Jedi taught us anything, it’s that sometimes that tension can lead to some of the most intriguing stories, both on-screen and in real life.
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