Whatever else Mark Hamill does in his career, he will always be Luke Skywalker first. While the actor appears to have come to terms with the fact, early battles with typecasting meant that he had trouble finding other work as an actor. But recently Hamill got to play a character about as unlike Luke as anything he’s ever done, thanks to horror maestro Mike Flanagan.
Appearing on the Potlickin podcast, Hamill talked about how grateful he was to play an “amoral, soulless, sociopath lawyer” in Flanagan’s Fall of the House of Usher, available with a Netflix subscription. Hamill said it was a unique role for him because, while he’d played bad guys before, he’d only really been able to do it in his voice work. Hamill said…
It was the first time I ever got to do, I did atypical roles all the time in voiceover. I mean, you play all these different gangsters and well, like I said, a gangster squirrel. But this was the first time I was ever get to do it on camera. And I’m really grateful for him.
On paper, Mark Hamill’s career probably looks fairly diverse. If Luke Skywalker is his most famous role, then number two has to be his work as the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series and other related projects. You can’t necessarily get much further apart than Luke Skywalker and the Joker.
But a great deal of Hamill’s career has been voice acting and it certainly sounds like part of that decision was that not showing his face gave Hamill the ability to do more diverse work than he could in live-action. He’s played bad guys before, even on camera, but his role in the terrifying Fall of the House of Usher was on another level.
The fact that Mark Hamill had never done a role like this is why Hamill says he’s grateful to Mike Flanagan because this wasn’t a case of Hamill going after the role. Flanagan came to Hamill with the offer, so the writer/director clearly saw something in the actor that others had not seen before.
Perhaps, now that Mark Hamill has played a terrible monster on film, more of those on-camera roles will open up to him. At 73, Mark Hamill doesn’t look to be slowing down as an actor whether he’s on camera or not.
The relationship between Hamill and Flanagan has only grown from there. Hamill has a role in the The Life of Chuck, the latest film by Flanagan based on the work of Stephen King. The movie debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this year and is currently on the 2025 movie schedule. Hamill isn’t playing an awful villain in the film, but there’s always hope for next time.