Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has revealed he planned to leave the United States when Donald Trump was re-elected as president in 2024.
The 73-year-old, known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the iconic sci-fi franchise, gave his wife Marilou Tork – whom he married in 1978 – the choice between relocating to “London or Ireland”.
Hamill’s wife, who worked as a dental hygienist and met Hamill while cleaning his teeth, ingeniously convinced her husband not to move countries by suggesting Trump was pushing them out of the US.
“She’s very clever. She didn’t respond right away but a week later she said, ‘I’m surprised you would allow him to force you out of your own country,’” Hamill, a lifelong Democrat, told The Times.
“‘That son of a b****’, I thought. I’m not leaving.”
When asked about the political landscape in the United States, Hamill expressed exasperation over “the bullying, the incompetence, the people in place” in the Trump administration.
The actor added that the only way he could “deal” with the his country’s politics without becoming suicidal was to look at the situation “like a thick, sprawling political novel” instead of reality.
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Despite his horror, Hamill added that he “still believes” there are “more honest, decent people” in the country than there are those in a Maga crowd. “If I didn’t, I’d move back to England,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Hamill revealed his dislike of US gun culture is such that he almost didn’t accept his role in a forthcoming adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel The Long Walk.
Hamill will play The Major, a man who runs an annual walking contest in a dystopian version of America that sees 100 young men walk continuously at a pace of four miles an hour – or they’ll be shot to death.
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“Francis Lawrence, the director, understood what was troubling me,” he said of his initial reluctance to take on the role.
“American society is gun violence and it’s hard to get past that, but as I spoke to him I realised this is just the guy. He said he would have been surprised if I wasn’t troubled by it.”
The actor went on to compare the film to recent ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] arrests in the country, saying agents wearing masks, with no identification, had been “pulling people out of their cars”.
“They were just brutalising people, kneeling on their necks,” he said. “When I made the movie I wasn’t thinking in terms of it being timely but it’s proven to be just that.”
Hamill led the three original Star Wars movies – Star Wars (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983) – as Luke Skywalker alongside Carrie Fisher as Princess Leira and Harrison Ford as Han Solo.
He reprised the role in all three films of the sequel trilogy: The Force Awakens (2015), The Last Jedi (2017), and The Rise of Skywalker (2019), as well as in numerous TV spin offs, including The Clone Wars and The Mandalorian.
