The ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi might not haunt Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, but Mark Hamill will always remember when Alec Guinness slapped him across the face. But, he wants everyone to know the new older Luke is not like Obi-Wan Kenboi.
On Tuesday, in a video interview published with Yahoo, Hamill admitted that he was obviously influenced by Alec Guinness’s performance as Obi-Wan when taking up the role Luke Skywalker, now several decades older than when audiences last saw him in Return of the Jedi. But, he says the similarities between Luke in The Last Jedi and Obi-Wan in A New Hope are fairly slim.
“But Obi-Wan has a much different back story than Luke, so although there are many similarities, you have to really sort of take ownership of your own character,” Hamill explained. These comments are interesting, insofar as it seems like Obi-Wan and Luke now share a similar life-altering event: an student turned to the Dark Side of the Force and screwed everything over. Perhaps everything Kylo Ren/Ben Solo isn’t as it seems?
This guy would have totally killed Obi-Wan if he'd been alive back then. That's how hardcore he is.
Mark Hamill also told Yahoo that the thing that stays with him more than Guinness’s performance was the time he slapped him. Apparently, Guinness was sick of Hamill calling him “Sir Alec,” referring to the elder actor’s knighthood. Eventually, Guinness snapped and slapped Hamill and told him to call him by his name. Obviously this is hilarious since both Luke and Obi-Wan are knights in Star Wars, but Luke tells C-3PO not to call him “Sir Luke.”
The Last Jedi opens on December 15.
