To be fair, he couldn’t make their wedding because he ran outta gas, had a flat tire, didn’t have money for a cab, his tux didn’t come back from the cleaners,and there was an earthquake, terrible floods and locusts.
She must’ve been crazy, it really wasn’t his fault.
In fact he was 106 miles from Chicago, he had half a pack of cigarettes, it was dark and he was wearing sunglasses. On the bright side he got to pay off some back taxes for the St Helen of the Blessed Shroud Orphanage and meet Steven Spielberg.
Yes, she published several books, all are hysterical and very good reads, too. She was famous for having a very sharp wit. She was also a famous Hollywood "script doctor" as she was known, often hired to fix scripts that weren't working. She was a very talented writer.
And all three ended up with great careers. Fisher did screenplays and was in other hit movies. Hamill dominated voice acting for decades once he started doing Joker
Yes. This is important. He was really a talented actor, not just good looking. Also he had charisma, good voice, good timing. All these are needed to be a star as big as he became. :)
I always love how people think the only way to have a successful career in Hollywood is to be a movie star. IIRC after working alongside Alec Guinness, Mark wanted to become a better actor and spent years working on stage productions after SW and Carrie was in some major films during the 80’s but just not as the lead actor because she was writing and producing more.
I always love how people think the only way to have a successful career in Hollywood is to be a movie star.
You don't think Mark Hamill would have wanted the A-List status of Harrison Ford to go along with his passion projects?
The problem is Mark Hamill is Luke Skywalker (and now also The Joker) and I can easily see a producer in the 80's just not being able to get past that at the casting process.
I think Hamill's non Star Wars films were duds, as well, while Ford had the contemporaneous Indiana Jones films and Blade Runner raise his profile even more. This was followed by the Jack Ryan films, other huge hits, oscar wins, etc. Ford was also older than Carrie and Mark, and yes, not hampered by the issues they were. And maybe he just has more of that star quality 'it factor.'
Hammill's injuries were not nearly as severe as people make it out to have been. I saw him appear at the premiere of Star Wars at Mann's (now Grauman's) Chinese Theater in Hollywood. He looked perfectly fine.
Yeah, the facial injury thing really only affected his appearance in ESB (they wrote in the wampa attack to explain his scars iirc). Even by ROTJ he looked fine.
Ford became a breakout star because he had the best lines: "I know.""Never tell me odds, kid""Laugh it up, fuzzball."
Unfortunately for Hamill, when the best line you've got is "I need to go to the Tosche Station to pick up some power converters," you've got a problem.
Also Hamill became a prolific voice actor and Fisher became a well-regarded script doctor, so they broke out too in their own ways, just not as leading role actors.
I don't think it's super uncommon for actors to change focus after an initial breakout. Like how Jordan Peele started as a television comedian on Mad TV and Key and Peele and clearly has talent there, but ended up as a solid director, especially of horror.
While he had a few roles as a Voice Actor earlier in his career, Mark Hamill focused on a theater career post-Star Wars in an attempt to shed his image as Luke Skywalker.
He starred in several major productions, including touring versions of The Elephant Man and Amadeus. In fact, his name was tossed around for the role of Mozart in the film version of Amadeus in 1984, but director Milos Foreman claimed, "I don't want Luke Skywalker in my film."
From there Hamill attempted a comeback playing the villain character in the 1988 film Slipstream, which was a major critical and financial failure.
He continued to appear in supporting roles in films like The Guyver and the John Carpenter anthology film Body Bags, so by the time he landed The Joker for Batman: The Animated Series in 1992, replacing original choice Tim Curry, it was very much a second act career move.
At that point he became the name Voice Actor we know today. But it came after a good decade of trying to find his place in Hollywood.
Curry had been cast first, but at the time he started recording his lines, he was sick with bronchitis, and his voice didn't work, as shown by the samples we got. They needed another actor on short notice, and Hamill, who had been considered, was called. Hamill had refined his laughs for years due to playing Mozart in Amadeus on Broadway, and was an easy fit.
Harrison Ford looks like a traditional hollywood leading man, Mark Hamill had a youthful look well into his thirties. Both were excellent choices for their respective roles in SW, but it should be no surprise who had more offers afterwards. Are you buying Mark Hamill as Indiana Jones or Jack Ryan? Me neither.
Carie Fisher is another thing all together. Competition for lead females is always fierce. Plus, other "considerations".
Mark was in a horrific car accident in 1977, which drastically changed his face due to the required reconstructive surgery. He no longer had his pretty boy good looks as he did in A New Hope. That probably impacted his marketability going forward.
I mean I think being a good voice actor is being a good actor. It’s just a different format/medium. That’s why people complain about voice casting celebrities who can only read lines, but struggle to voice act them.
Great lines perfectly delivered. He gave Solo the character it needed in the same way Robert Downey Jr did for Tony Stark. I remember the I Know and thinking “What a jerk! I love Han Solo” all in the same running thought.
The power converters… what a quintessential George Lucas line. What would a teenage boy be bummed about, not being able to go out partying with his friends? Or not being able to go pick up some farm equipment?.. with his friends, for some reason…
Because Lucas and Spielberg cast Ford in Indiana Jones. It's that simple. Afterwards he didn't have to worry about being typecast. Hamill played Mozart on stage but the executives at Warner Brothers refused to have fucking Luke Skywalker in their prestige picture so he lost the role in the film.
Selleck has a great feel for comedy, but also invariably plays roles on the darker side. Raiders would have been so different with him, and I feel like not in a good way. I can’t think of a light hearted anything Selleck has done. Even his role on Three Men and a Baby felt darker than the other two dads. Or his role on Rockford Files - he did great with the comedy of it, but also brought a dark edge. Hard to explain, really, but for me, Selleck always brings a melancholy.
Uhh hello! Quite Down Under!! It’s very light hearted & not dark at all. He would have been decent as Indy.
He would have brought a less timeless appeal to the role though, similar to any other Selleck role. He has an 80’s cheese to him that Harrison’s Indy just doesn’t have.
Selleck defines a time period. Harrison is timeless.
Indiana Jones
That is the character which cemented him as a box office star. Moved him up from being one of the guys in a movie, to being the guy.
Carrie Fisher was featured in a number of big movies, but is largely the less remembered person in Blue Brothers , Man with One Red Shoe, Hannah in Her Sisters, or the Burbs. She didn’t hit in anything else to make the move to female star, which at the time required being a solid rom/com lead. She wasn’t the same draw as Med Ryan or Julia Roberts.
Hamil spent the eighties on Broadway
Han Solo wasn’t his big break. It wasn’t the one movie which made him famous, it was being in two of the big action franchises that made the difference and I’ll even argue Raiders was the more important one as he carried the entire movie.
Carrie had a lot of really great featured roles in films like When Harry Met Sally and SoapDish, but she spent most of that time in the 80s and 90s writing and script doctoring. If you liked a comedy in those decades, there’s a good bet she touched the script at some point.
Mark Hamill was in theatre for years, and also voice acting. Basing his acting abilities on Star Wars is somewhat unjust, as the writing, frankly, was terrible.
Some of us were alive back then and remember hearing about the clunky dialogue that the cast changed. “You can write it, George, but you sure can’t say it.” That’s from the original.
That Harrison Ford quote is incomplete. The actual quotes are:
“I told George: ‘You can’t say that stuff. You can only type it.’ But I was wrong. It worked.”
“I did shout it. 'George, you can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it! Move your mouth when you're typing!' But it was a joke, at the time. A stress-relieving joke.”
If you weren’t around back then, you may not realize that Hamill was absolutely roasted for his performance. He attracted the same kind of abuse that Ridley did.
May be this explains why. Cos Lucas and his gang are all influential movie makers and never had Hamil in any of their movies while Ford worked with all of them
What part in another Lucas and gang film would Hamill be the best pick for?
(It's worth remembering that Ford wasn't even first pick for Indiana Jones. He got lucky there. Not that he wasn't excellent. But Lucas had a policy of not reusing the same actors, and he'd already used Ford twice. Spielberg had to convince him.)
This is the answer. This film made him a movie star. Between Star Wars ANH and Raiders his career floundered (Hanover Street, the Frisco Kid, etc.). Star Wars ANH made a big splash with its effects, but the actors names were hardly household words. It was Raiders that put him on the map as a leading man, which he has been able to build on ever since.
There are more roles for the charismatic hero with an interesting past than there are for the chosen boy. Type casting helped Ford and hurt Hamill. And that's ignoring that Ford is the better live action actor. Hamill is an amazing voice actor though, so let's not sell him short. Fisher's personal issues hurt her more than anything.
Hamill lost out on playing Mozart in the film Amadeus (a role he played on Broadway) precisely because of this. Tom Hulce was amazing, but I think Hamill's career trajectory would have looked very different if he had been cast.
He's a much better actor, which is clear from interviews. Everyone who worked with Lucas complained that he never told them what kind of performance he wanted. Even with a total lack of helpful direction, Harrison Ford came up with a genuinely watchable performance that's consistent in every scene. He's so good, he was good in a George Lucas-directed film.
Yes, I think that's the best way I've heard it put.
I love a lot of George Lucasfilm stuff, but he is very no-direction towards the actors, at least back then, as far as I've heard people recount.
Thats when someone with a strong personality could shine, and others, especially younger types, like Hamill or Fisher needed a little bit more to go on.
And I'm not criticizing them, so much as saying that some actors thrive better under different directors or conditions.
Samuel L Jackson and Quinton Tarintino come to mind.
Growing up listening to the Joker in the animated series blew my mind. Later on I found out it was Hamill, which to me, tells that story.
And I'm not criticizing them, so much as saying that some actors thrive better under different directors or conditions.
Natalie Portman in particular is one I'd call "a director's actor", in that she seems to be from the school of thought that says an actor is to be an extension of the director's will, no more and no less. It can produce amazing results but needs a director willing to work that way, too. And George just didn't work that way.
Contrast with Ewan McGregor who seemed to make his top priority "make this feel Star Warsy" and as such does some more interesting stuff with his performance. Or Christopher Lee, with what seems to be a deep professional commitment to the role and the production in general, and brought all his usual gravitas to the table.
Harrison Ford had also just had a breakthrough with American Graffiti. He was a rising star even before Star Wars, where he was portrayed as one of the better actors of the three leads. Basically, he gave a good performance, had swagger the other characters didn’t, and had a leg up at the start.
Harrison was a handsome and charming leading man. He stole the show on Star Wars, and I cant name a single movie he has been in that was bad. Also unlike the other 2 he had huge success with American Graffiti and Indiana Jones which I think led to him avoiding being typecast as just a Star Wars character.
Carrie was a nepo baby, she had a solid career as a supporting character, but I think she lacked the “look” and range for a leading A lister.
Carrie Fisher also was an excellent screenwriter, author and script doctor who struggled with substance abuse and alcohol. She, like a lot of leading women in the 70s/80s, had a harder time finding roles at first that didn’t exploit or underuse them in their youth later to be ignored as they aged compared to men like Harrison Ford. She found a lot more success behind the scenes than in front of the camera.
This plus she had mental health issues that really don't play nice with substance abuse (not that any do). She also had some rough treatments that would make working difficult.
Edit to add: Mark got typecast and action stars were changing by the end of the trilogy. He went into stage work and had a great career on Broadway. He also is a fucking legendary voice actor. He DEFINED the joker.
I suspect Hamill also preferred voice-acting roles - as he said in one of the featurettes about "Batman: The Animated Series", he loves the fact that you can go full ham with body acting while voicing a character without having to worry about looking silly.
Maybe but according to imdb, his first non-Star Wars voice acting role was 9 years after Return of the Jedi. He had several movies roles between then, and none were especially memorable. Feels like he pivoted to voice acting when regular acting didn't work out.
Yeah I hate to say it but I think the biggest reason hamill’s screen acting career didn’t take off is because he’s just not that good of an actor- don’t get me wrong he’s a great voice actor but that’s a different skill. Ford on the other hand is a very solid screen actor and has the looks and charm to go with it
Hamill also got into a car accident and I would say that accident affected his movie star looks face. He was never going to be a leading man actor like Ford but I think the accident played a minor role.
Hamill's nose was mangled so badly that I would go so far as to call him mildly deformed afterward. Without that high, straight nose bridge, he went from having wholesome, anodyne good looks to a guy who was a bit funny-looking. And remember, the '80s were all about bland, inoffensive good looks when it came to male actors: think Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, Richard Gere, and Mickey Rourke (before Rourke's ill-conceived boxing career and face surgeries).
Harrison Ford has the magic that makes a real movie star. Humor, looks and charisma. Plus he got the Indiana Jones franchise as well. He's also proven he can do more "serious" stuff. He's an allrounder.
Carrie Fisher made some other choices after the movies and had some substance related problems. For women working in the industry (especially back then) that can cause a lot of problems to get work. Men are more easily forgiven.
Mark Hamill never really escaped Luke Skywalker. Ford outshone him from the beginning and he had an accident during filming of the trilogy. He clawed out eventually and I actually think he's more positively viewed now than back then.
Everyone loved Harrison Ford, he had universal appeal. Men, women gay or straight. There werent many like that then or since. Maybe Mel Gibson in his prime? Universal appeal. You could make the case that he was the last of the leading men?
A lot of people are forgetting is that Hamill was in a major car accident after Star Wars was released. The scars on his face in empire were real. Since he was a male in the 80’s, scars were not what people wanted to see.
Fisher, she married Simon and he was super controlling. He didn’t even want her in Empire. He also was mad at her outfit in Jedi.
So the two had a lot of potential, and just life happened.
Carry fisher’s mother was famous. She work with her mother since she was a child. So she didn’t have to work. Plus she loved cocaine so she was busy with that. Mark Hammill had that bad car accident right before the 3rd movie. It disfigured his face, not bad. But after that he stayed behind the scenes. And had an amazing career in voice acting.
2nd movie: they wrote the Wampa scenes to explain why Luke's face was busted up ... After that he got self conscious about having close ups of his face. He also was a voice actor first and went back to doing that as his primary career.
Throughout the 90's he was the voice of both the Joker and Hobgoblin, then in the early 2000's he regularly showeded up in Cartoon Network shows + did Fire Lord Ozai in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Harrison had that bit of luck with Raiders. Tom Selleck had the part but wasn’t released from his Magnum PI gig so Spielberg suggested Harrison, and the rest is history as they say.
Hamill was just okay as an awestruck farm boy as part of an ensemble. Fisher was perfectly decent but she was a nepp baby hire before we knew what they was.
Ford was a super charismatic actor that got cast as the perfect blend of anti hero.
I would be more surprised if it turned out differently.
Maybe not A-listers like Ford, but Fisher was reportedly one of the best script doctors in Hollywood and Hamil has had a prolific career as a voice actor.
I think people just like Ford the most. George Lucas also kept him on to do Indy very soon after which definitely helped. Ford is also easily the best actor out of the others.
Hamill had the car accident between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. It affected his look. Hard to say, if it doesn't happen, what his career might be, though he became one hell of a voice actor and had a pretty good career in that respect.
As for Carrie? Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Nothing more need be said.
I think it's a combination of factors for each of them.
For Mark Hamill:
Harrison had a better character in A New Hope; better lines, more interesting characterization, and the morally grey antihero was a more popular character type at the time.
Mark's next couple roles didn't really break out, so while Harrison Ford was also getting known as Indiana Jones, Deckard, etc. Mark Hamill was still just Luke Skywalker. After a while, he got pigeonholed and typecast.
The facial injuries from his car accident may have hurt his bankability as a leading man.
Being only 5 foot 7 probably didn't help either.
For Carrie Fisher:
Drug problems.
Undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
Other than The Blues Brothers, none of the other movies she made around that time were big hits.
Sexism probably played at least some role as well.
To be fair, Hammill is an absolutely incredible voice actor with a pretty impressive career. Also he was Cockknocker and that was fantastic. I don't think Carrie Fisher was seeking fame. She grew up in the mess that was "Hollywood royalty". As the films progress it was pretty clear Harrison Ford was the better actor at the time.
I thought Hamill had a bad accident between the movies?
But honestly, he is probably one of the few actors who has a late, VERY late acclaim by being offered really great roles in a very late age. He did some stuff before, his voice work is excellent.
But him meeting Mike Flanagan was a match made in heaven.
Carrie Fisher had a combination of problems but my God, was she witty. I loved how she managed to make fun of her running without a bra in the movie or being sold as a shampoo later, in front of George Lucas.
Harrison Ford had bags of charisma and leading man looks. He could slot into any leading role. Hamill played an overgrown child with a 1950s "awww shucks" sensibility", hardly surprising casting directors weren't beating his door down. Carrie Fisher should have been bigger but I think she was more interested in cocaine and partying to concentrate on her career.
Because Han was a lot cooler, and Harrison Ford was then in Raiders of the Lost Ark a couple of years later, playing another very cool, iconic character.
Personally, I think because he was older than the other two he made better decisions regarding his career path. I'm not saying the other 2 were stupid or anything, but because they were younger perhaps they didn't put a much thought into their future career as he did. He didn't build his identity around his character from those movies so that left him more options when they ended.
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u/ChuckFarkley 10h ago
Hammill had a disfiguring accident and Fisher had a drug problem.