It is now a well-known fact that Luke Skywalker's last name in the original script of A New Hope, then titled just Star Wars, was Starkiller. It was later changed to the iconic version, which went on to define the entire saga across three trilogies.
But when the swap was done, Mark Hamill was not one of the first people to find out.
Speaking on This Morning, Hamill reminisced about filming an eight-page screen test for the first movie with Harrison Ford. The actor admitted that he did not have any clue about the rest of the story, and even presumed that Ford would play the protagonist, and he would be the leading man's teenage "annoying sidekick."
Imagine Hamill's surprise when he found out that was not the case. However, neither Ford nor George Lucas was of much help when he asked for more context clues. Lucas, famously, did not like delving deeper into the nuances of the scenes and the actions of his characters, and Ford, well, was probably just being Harrison Ford.
"He's not a director who likes to talk about motivation and backstory," Hamill said about Lucas. "He cast people that are so close to what he wants that he doesn't want to direct us."
Evidently, more surprises were in store for Hamill. A week after he filmed the Death Star rescue sequence, where his character introduced himself as Luke Starkiller to Leia, he was asked to shoot the same scene again, this time as Luke Skywalker.
After enacting the dialogue from the scene, Hamill shared, "They came back the next week and I said, 'Why are we doing that scene again?' They said, 'Oh, they've changed your name.' I said, 'To what?' And they said, 'To Skywalker.' And now you've gotten so used to the other. Plus, let's face it, Luke could use a little macho-ing with his name. It sounded like Luke Flyswatter. I hated it. I just hated it."
In a 2024 podcast episode of Politickin', Hamill revealed that the production team thought Starkiller was too aggressive for Luke's personality. They even did research on women between the ages of 18 and 35 and concluded that they don't like characters with 'kill' in their name.
In retrospect, it is almost impossible to imagine not only Luke but Anakin and Princess Leia with the last name 'Starkiller', or to be more precise, without the last name 'Skywalker'. Starkiller, however, was later used in the 2008 video game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the character Galen Marek, Darth Vader's secret apprentice. While Galen Marek is now part of Legends, the name Starkiller lives on in canon. It was the name of the First Order's base on the planet previously called Ilum in the sequel movies, and therefore, forever now a part of Star Wars history.