MOVIE NEWS – Apparently, the original Star Wars trilogy cast wasn’t too keen on the idea of the Force Awakens…

In October 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. The company was keen to relaunch the Star Wars films, which had not been released since 2008. Their original plan was to release one film a year starting in 2015, starting with an episode bringing back Hamill, Fisher and Ford. Although Disney made hundreds of millions of dollars in 2015 with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” Lucasfilm’s annual ambitions have since changed. They’ve turned to expanding the franchise’s stories to include streaming on the small screen.

But in a behind-the-scenes documentary, Hamill, Fisher and Ford revealed the fear they felt when The Force Awakens was initially pitched to them. None of them thought it was a good idea.

What next?

Hamill was particularly puzzled. Why would they bring Luke Skywalker back when his story was already finished? However, it seemed that since 1983, fans and writers had begun to question what might have happened to the character in the decades since. They even imagined scenarios in which he lost faith in the Jedi order. But Hamill did not think bringing Luke back in any capacity was a good idea. The actor said in the documentary:

“I was just astonished. I mean, I can’t tell you. I mean, it was the last thing in the world I expected. Part of me thought, ‘Oh my god, no. It’s just a terrible idea. I had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I can’t really see anything that I could add to it.”

In The Force Awakens, Luke spends most of the film hiding, off-camera. He seems disillusioned with being a Jedi.

In the film’s closing scene, a new character, Rey (Daisy Ridley), calls Luke back to the battlefield to fight a new threat as heir to the Empire.

Fisher, meanwhile, felt that he and his fellow actors had aged out of the roles. “Star Wars is a gritty adventure series” and seemed to suggest that adventure was best left to a new generation. Hamill was 64 in 2015, Fisher 59 and Ford 73:

“I was surprised. I mean, you know, you think, ‘Really? We waited this long? I looked better, like, 10 years ago, we could’ve done it then.”

In the finished film, Leia was introduced as a general in a new rebellion called the Resistance and an expert in military tactics. She was not directly involved in the fighting.

Like everything, Star Wars is changing…

Ford has repeatedly expressed his dislike for the character of Han Solo. He felt that Solo was not complex enough. Returning to the character repeatedly robbed him of his simple heroism. He thought that Han Solo should have died in one of the earlier Star Wars films to bring closure to the character and take future sequels off the table. While Han Solo-loving fans felt that the character had a lot of potential to return in a “Star Wars” movie, Ford felt the opposite. He was done with the character. He said:

“At the end of the first three films that we made, I had no thought whatsoever about revisiting the character or whether there was any ambition to bring the three characters back again. I never gave it a moment’s thought. If I had been asked at the time, I probably wouldn’t have imagined the potential for it.”

Indeed, over the years, Ford has become famously acerbic about “Star Wars” issues, as he was a professional actor trying to ply his craft and develop his talents.

He refused to talk about an archetypal space cowboy he had played years earlier. It was only in his 70s – and perhaps with a touch of nostalgia – that Ford was willing to reprise some of his famous roles. He returned as Han Solo in 2015; in 2017, he repeated Deckard in Blade Runner 2049. And in 2023, at the age of 79, he returned as Indiana Jones.

Source: YouTube