Star Wars icon Mark Hamill stirred fans' emotions Saturday when he shared a photo captured with co-star Harrison Ford, sharing an imagined reunion between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.
"What a Han/Luke reunion might have been like," the Luke Skywalker star tweeted, attaching a photo taken with Ford when Hamill was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last March.
Solo was a victim of patricide when the corrupted Ben Solo (Adam Driver) killed the legendary outlaw-turned-hero in the J.J. Abrams-directed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Luke, who had retreated to the unfindable planet of Ahch-To as a hermit cut off from the Force, would only learn of Han's death when approached by budding Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) in Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi.
Johnson excised a scene that briefly showed Luke grieving Han alone in his stone hut, later explaining to EW the cut was made to better serve pacing.
"We realized just for pacing in that section we had to stick with Rey and Luke, and we wanted just to go straight from him slamming the door of the hut into the day-in-the-life montage, of him going around the island," Johnson said.
"Taking that bit out suddenly propelled us forward into that segment in a way that just felt much better for the film."
Johnson then acknowledged he was "very sorry to lose it."
"I think it's a beautiful performance from Mark Hamill," he added. "But I think we get a similar beat with him later when he's in the Falcon with R2."
Hamill has since said the lack of a reunion between Luke, Han, and Leia (Carrie Fisher) was "a big mistake."
"I just thought, Luke's never going to see his best friend again. You look at it in a self-centered way," Hamill told Den of Geek earlier this week.
"I said that it was a big mistake that those three people would never reunite in any way. I guess I was wrong, because nobody seems to care! I have to stipulate that I care, but it didn't really seem to affect the larger audience. Luke, Han, and Leia will never be together again, and I'll probably never get to work with Harrison again."
Though Hamill acknowledges the focus is now on "the new generation, as it should be," the star expressed disappointment with the lack of reverence towards the old guard — pointing to a key scene where Dark Side user Kylo Ren tells Rey to forget and kill the past.
"They had me walking by Threepio, not even acknowledging him," Hamill said.
"I said: 'I can't do that! [Johnson] said, 'Okay, go over and do whatever.' So I went over, and I did whatever. They say it in the script: 'Forget the past, kill it if you have to,' and they're doing a pretty good job!"
Luke did get to reunite with sister Leia — albeit in the form of a Force projection — in The Last Jedi, which would prove to be the late Fisher's final turn as the storied general.
Hamill, who reprises his role in the upcoming Episode IX, said Fisher would get a kick out of knowing her Leia would be involved in the Skywalker finale through the use of repurposed and unused footage originally filmed for The Force Awakens.
Disney-Lucasfilm releases Abrams' Star Wars: Episode IX December 20.