Mark Hamill explains why a young Luke Skywalker story probably couldn’t work

Mark Hamill is in high spirits today, anticipating accepting his lifetime achievement award from Disney during the company’s D23 convention, but as the actor makes his way through the line of press, all anyone wants to talk about it Star Wars.

And Hamill, being his boyishly, charming self, is happy to oblige.

Although the actor can’t talk about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the next installment in the main Star Wars franchise, or Episode 9, he does have a few thoughts about the stand-alone anthology movies. When asked if he thought a young Luke Skywalker movie could ever work, in the same spirt as a young Han Solo movie, Hamill admitted the concept would be kind of boring.

“He had a more colorful life prior to Star Wars than I did,” Hamill said about Han Solo movie. “[The Luke Skywalker movie] would be set on a moisture farm on a desert planet. He [Han] was a rogue and a scoundrel and there’s so much potential for his exploits, like how he got the Millennium Falcon from Lando, we have people on staff who are historians on it, who know every fact. And I’ll tell you, I haven’t seen the original movies since they were in theaters. I don’t watch them on home video, so you can tell the fans know more about it than me.”

Although Hamill doesn’t think a young Luke Skywalker movie would work, the actor does believe that having an aging cast is a positive quality to the franchise. Hamill said it acknowledges that actors and characters age, but their stories never get less interesting. Being a part of a franchise that grandparents, parents and children can all enjoy in different periods of their life is special.

“It’s so much in the tradition of the Disney tradition and family entertainment,” Hamill said.

It’s because of Star Wars’ ability to span multiple generations that Hamill feels the franchise belongs at Disney.

“It’s very analogous to the Disney Animated classics. It is timeless in its own way,” Hamill said. “Sometimes even in the harshest way possible. Before The Force Awakens came out and years after [Return of the] Jedi, the parents would be pushing the kids in airports going, ‘Look who it is! It’s Luke!’ And they’d look up at me, these four year old kids, ‘But he’s so old! What happened to this guy? He really let himself go!’

“I didn’t look like anything the old Luke they remember. They don’t have any concept of time. They think we made Star Wars two weeks ago.”

Now with The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, kids are getting the opportunity to discover an entirely new Luke and that, Hamill said, is one of his favorite reasons he belongs to the Star Wars universe.

The next installment in the Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, will be released Dec. 15.