John Wesley Shipp Wishes Happy Birthday to ‘The Flash’ Co-star Mark Hamill

Mark Hamill and John Wesley Shipp might play foes in the world of television, but it looks like the pair are in a celebratory mood today.

Shipp recently shared a pretty endearing post on his Twitter account, in which he wished Hamill a very happy birthday. The post, which includes a series of photos of the actors on both The Flash television shows, can be found below.

As fans will remember, Shipp played Barry Allen on the 1990’s incarnation of The Flash, before stepping into the roles of Henry Allen and Jay Garrick on The CW’s current reboot. Hamill played James Jesse/The Trickster on the original series, a role he has since reprised several times over. The two characters have butted heads on several different “earths” over the past few years, something that Hamill was eager to do.

“I’d already watched The Flash because I wanted to see how they used John Wesley Shipp, who I admire so much,” Hamill told ComicBook.com back in 2016. “And I thought they were doing a great job! Then they called and said, ‘Do you want ot be involved?’ And I thought since I’m a contemporary of John’s, I’ll probably be the prison warden or I could be a cellmate of his — who knows? When they said, ‘No, we want you to be the Trickster,’ I almost fell over. I was like, ‘You can’t be serious!’ It was borderline danger to put on a skintight unitard 20 years ago, whenever it was, I don’t think it’s going to really work, you guys. Let’s make it age-appropriate; it’ll be goofy. But as you know, they have a very smart way of dealing with the characters and it was a much more subdued and sort of Hannibal Lecter-y version of the character.”

“People keep saying ‘is coming back to The Flash weird?’” Shipp added. “And it hasn’t been [weird], as long as I was playing a very different Henry Allen. But once I suit up and Grant and I are running around, and suddenly I’m face-to-face with Mark Hamill‘s Trickster, it’s like, who could have predicted that this would happen? It’s really a trip.”

What do you think of Shipp’s birthday post to Hamill? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

The season five premiere of The Flash, which is titled “Nora”, will debut on Tuesday, October 9th, at 8/7c on The CW.