Mark Hamill joins Jacob Elordi, Dwayne Johnson, Michael B. Jordan, Wagner Moura, Adam Sandler and Jeremy Allen White for The Hollywood Reporter’s Oscar season Actors Roundtable, as they all hope for their first Oscar nomination (announced January 22nd).
Mark, ever since the first Star Wars trilogy, you’ve gravitated toward things that allowed you to show other sides of yourself, including collaborating with Mike Flanagan on the 2023 limited series The Fall of the House of Usher and now this film.
HAMILL When you do something well in Hollywood, they want you to do that over and over again because it’s a proven entity. I went to Broadway because I knew that there were open auditions. It wasn’t like they were saying, “Please come here and do theater!” When I got into voiceover, I thought, “Where has this been all my life?” Because they cast with their ears, not their eyes, and you’re able to play parts you’d never get in a million years if you were on camera. And I got really spoiled — I got to the point where I thought, “I don’t care if I ever do on-camera again.” But I was a fan of Mike’s before he contacted me for The Fall of the House of Usher — he has these wonderful ensembles, and I love ensembles because the weight of the picture’s not on your shoulders — and we just clicked. The second time he called me, he said, “I have something you might be interested in that’s based on a Stephen King novella.” Based on Mike’s reputation and Stephen King’s, I was expecting the supernatural epic of all time, but The Life of Chuck is a life-affirming portrait of a young man at four different stages of his life. I was knocked out by it. If it weren’t for Mike, I think I’d still just be doing voiceover because the older you get, the less you care — this is something you all have to look forward to! (Laughs.) I shouldn’t put it that way. You do care, but you don’t sweat the small stuff.
Read/watch the interview in full here.
Image: Mark Hamill styled by Michael Fisher; Brooks Brothers suit, shirt, belt, socks. Photographed by Beau Grealy
