Star Wars: Mark Hamill on the new generation

There's just over a year to go beforeStar Wars: The Force Awakens arrives in cinemas, and both Lucasfilm and Disney will be rubbing their hands thus far at the reaction to the first teaser trailer that landed a week or two back.

One person who wasn't in that trailer, to the surprise of many, was Mark Hamill. We got lots of new characters, but we didn't get Luke Skywalker. Chatting to Yahoo!, Hamill has explained that.

"This is about the new generation of characters; I think that’s the most important thing." he said. "It’s the opening act of a whole new approach to the storytelling."

"I never thought I’d be involved in it again, period," he admitted. "And then when George [Lucas] said that they wanted to do more, I rightly assumed that it wouldn’t be our story, because we had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This must be our offspring and the current generation, with us there lending the kind of support that Peter Cushing and Alec Guinness did in the original. So no, that didn’t surprise me".

Specifically chatting about the new droid, now known as BB-8, Hamill added that "they never cease to amaze me with what they’re able to come up with, you know? I said 'how are you ever gonna top R2-D2, the most adorable droid in movie history?’ And then they have this new one ... when they were demonstrating how they did this thing, live on set — because it’s not CGI, that’s a live prop — I was just amazed. They let me play around with it. [Laughs] I was running it all around at the creature shop up in Pinewood. I’m telling you, it’s an absolute delight."

Hamill gives the impression of a man who's had a ball on his return to the world of Star Wars, confessing "it's just so much fun." And we get to see the fruits of his labour on December 18th, 2015. Expect the queue to have started by late November...

Yahoo!

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