Star Wars Episode VII: Mark Hamill Seemingly Confirms Original Cast Return

Without actually saying the words, Mark Hamill seems to have confirmed he and other members of the original Star Wars cast will return for the upcoming, J.J. Abrams-directed sequel Star Wars Episode VII. Of course, he's hardly the first to have done so...but each time Carrie Fisher "comes out" as part of the cast, it's followed up by a quick "she was joking," and Harrison Ford has resisted the urge to talk about it as much as possible. This, though, is a lot of dancing around the statement while still making it abundantly clear that Hamill is in. "I don't even think I believed that the third trilogy would feature us. I thought it would be all different characters," Hamill told an audience at EW's CapeTown Festival. To my knowledge, we were just going to do a beginning, a middle and an end [in the original trilogy] and it was over." The actor said that he's only had one creative meeting on the new films so far--it's not clear from context whether that was the meeting with George Lucas and Carrie Fisher at which he found out that there would be more films, or a second one with the folks behind Episode VII--and that his biggest contribution to the conversation was a desire to find a balance between practical and CGI effects. "That's what the challenge is," he's quoted as saying. "To try and meet expectations of what [fans] want. I think there's nothing wrong with CGI, but I think you have to have a balance, because the camera perceives the width and the depth and the weight – even if it's a miniature model, the camera just realizes that. So when you have too much CGI and the clouds are CGI and the trees are CGI and the buildings are CGI, you're getting to a point where the figure in the shot is like a hybrid of an animated film and live-action. And I want it to have an organic look so that we don't get into Roger Rabbit territory. But I don't imagine that the priority is what I want!" He also has an idea for what he hopes to get out of Luke Skywalker--a little less stuntwork. "Heavy on the Jedi mind tricks, less on the lightsaber duels. That one in Empire nearly killed me! Six weeks I'm being beaten within an inch of my life on a daily basis! It was awful! And then it's cut down to like six minutes. 'Eh, it's no big deal.'"