Mark Hamill Comes Home To The Millennium Falcon

Entertainment Weekly's Star Wars: The Last Jedi issue is due to hit stands this Friday. Until then, expect to be bombarded with a ton of great new information from the upcoming film.

From Entertainment Weekly:

Luke Skywalker quietly walks aboard the Millennium Falcon, alone. His old friends are gone. His old life is gone. He is ghostlike himself.

The old Luke Skywalker is gone, too.

That’s a scene from the latest trailer for The Last Jedi (see it here), but in real life, visiting the set of the old Corellian freighter was a similarly haunting experience for Mark Hamill.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t expect to have the reaction I had,” the 66-year-old actor tells EW. “I was there with my family, with [my children] Nathan and Griffin and Chelsea and my wife Marilou, and [Lucasfilm] asked if the documentary crew could be there when I came back on the Millennium Falcon. I mean, this was not on the shooting day. I was just street clothes and going to visit that set. And I said, ‘Sure.’”

It didn’t take long for it to overwhelm him. “It was sort of like visiting an old house that you lived in when you were a kid,” he says. “I mean, I just welled up with emotion and I said, ‘I need to be by myself.’”

When the others left, the actor reacted much the way Luke does in the scene. He looked around, took it in. Let it hit him.

“They had recreated it down to every last detail that I remember. The oil drips, the hanging pipes, just everything. The dice in the cockpit,” he said.

The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson says that shot of Luke venturing into the Falcon was one of the first days of shooting with Hamill at Pinewood Studios.

“God, I remember so vividly getting that shot of him turning on the lights in the Falcon cockpit,” Johnson says. The cockpit set is an enclosed space, so every crew member on set was huddled around the video monitors to see it unfold. “And we all kind of looked at each other, just like, ‘Oh my God.”

It was an emotional scene, but not especially jubilant. “There’s a lot of melancholy,” Johnson says. “You know, that ship is just filled with ghosts for Luke.”

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