Mark Hamill, completely unrecognisable in episode six of the new adaptation of Carrie on Amazon Prime Video, reveals how after the Star Wars sequels he thought it was a good time to retire, and then, out of nowhere, Mike Flanagan contacted him to do The Fall of the House of Usher.
When I finished the [Star Wars] sequels, I thought maybe this is a good time to, well … to use a word both my agent and my wife hate: retire,” Hamill says. “I probably wouldn’t have announced it. I just didn’t have the drive I had in my earlier years. And then out of nowhere, Mike Flanagan contacted me to do The Fall of the House of Usher.”
On the journey from Los Angeles to the Canadian film set, the actor felt, well … scared. But also invigorated. “I was on the plane on the way to Vancouver with absolutely no idea, I mean zero, how I’m going to play Pym,” he says.
He found the soul—or lack thereof—while in the makeup chair. He felt Pym would shun everything except for his dirty work. “I said to the hair people, ‘He’s dedicated to his job, so the less time spent on grooming, the better. He’s the guy that would want to get out of the shower, rub a towel once, and be done with it,’ ” Hamill recalls. “I said, ‘Make it short.’ Then I found the wardrobe, I found the glasses, I found the hat.”
In his first scene, he found the voice: a low growl. “I wanted to convey that he was sort of dead inside, that he had no soul and no sort of human emotions,” Hamill says. “I wanted him to be somebody that if you’d met him, you wouldn’t want to be around him. So I just started talking in that voice, just that dead voice.”
It was not something he discussed with Flanagan ahead of time. “We were doing the scenes, we were doing different setups, and later in the day when he walked by, just as an aside, he didn’t even stop, he said, ‘Love the voice,’ ” Hamill recalls.
On his role in Carrie….
The Star Wars actor is hiding in plain sight in the very first scene, a prologue to the episode that focuses on a phony-baloney fortune teller named Damon Nostra (aka Greg McMurray), who claims to have the power to hear the dead. A grisly scene then plays out as a tearful young woman sits down at his séance table and reveals she can do the same. Or, rather, she can actually do it—and it’s driving her to bloody madness.
Think of it as Hamill dressing up for Halloween. “I remember saying, ‘I want to be as unrecognizable as possible,’ and since he’s sort of this mysterious mystic figure, the sky’s the limit,” Hamill tells Esquire in his one-and-only interview about the role. “I said, ‘I need a nose!’ ”
He initially wanted to go completely uncredited. “I thought it would be more fun if we could try and pull one over on the public,” he says. “Maybe somebody would say, ‘Oh, that’s Mark! I recognize his voice,’ or whatever. And we just wouldn’t comment on it. I love stuff like that.”
Being unmasked like the foiled villain in a Scooby-Doo episode is “no big deal,” Hamill says. He’s happy to be associated with the show, developed for TV by his now frequent collaborator Flanagan. “I’m just knocked out by Carrie,” Hamill says. “At first, I thought, Well, why would he want to redo something that’s considered a classic by Brian De Palma? Then you see why, because when he can expand, he can tell you so much more about the friends at school. … I mean, he just has the luxury of eight hours to tell this story.”
You’d need about the same length of time to walk through all of Hamill’s memorable performances, but this time we decided to focus only on the especially strange ones: the monsters, outcasts, and weirdos he has brought to life in tales of the otherworldly and supernatural. It goes back a long way, to when he was just a little kid.
Read the interview in full here. Watch the new Carrie series on Amazon Prime Video.
Image: Amazon Prime Video
