‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’: Mark Hamill Describes His Emotional Return To The Millennium Falcon

It turns out that returning to the Millennium Falcon was as emotional an experience for Mark Hamill as it was for Luke Skywalker.

Hamill tells Entertainment Weekly that the emotion took him by surprise.

“I’m telling you, I didn’t expect to have the reaction I had,” he says. “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 was sort of like visiting an old house that you lived in when you were a kid,” he continues. “I mean, I just welled up with emotion and I said, ‘I need to be by myself.’”

Once he was alone, Hamill let everything really wash over 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.

Hamill admits that he never expected to be returning to the world of Star Wars so many years later.

“All of this, happening to me again was… it’s hard to put into words,” Hamill says. “I figured when the prequels came out, plus a few years, people would forget about us. But it never really went away. People have these stories they tell you, you know, about how [Star Wars] helped them through hard times. Or they met their wife in line for this [movie], and were married by that one, and had a child by that one.”

Of course, now that he has returned, Hamill himself can start measuring the time of his life in terms of Star Wars movies.

“I feel like, you know, I need to calm things down because it’s one of those things that if you start crying, I’ll start crying,” he says. “So, stop it.”

Of course, as Hamill himself has said, the “broken warrior” that is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Last Jedi isn’t exactly the same optimistic youth he played in the original Star Wars trilogy.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in theaters on December 15, 2017. It will be followed by Star Wars: Episode IX on December 20, 2019. The next standalone film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, will release on May 25, 2018.