MOVIE NEWS – A Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund has auditioned for the role of Luke Skywalker. In fact, his failed audition played a role in Mark Hamill getting the part.

Horror icon Robert Englund has a connection to the character of Luke Skywalker that you may not have known about. Many years before Nightmare on Elm Street, Englund auditioned for Star Wars. Of course, it wasn’t originally the film that got him to audition. Englund was first in the building where the auditions were held only because he wanted to audition for a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Englund explained:

“I had managed to read a bootleg script, and I was begging my agent and trying everything I could, pulling every string I could to get in to audition for Apocalypse Now. I got in there and I was dressed in my thrift store, military secondhand clothing, and I was all tan and long blonde hair. And they thought, for a moment, I might be right for the surfer role.”

Englund as Lance – or did he mean Colonel Kilgore?! That’s almost as hard to imagine as Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. In the end, Englund was not cast in the film. However, while he was in the building, a casting agent thought he would be perfect for a “space movie that they were casting across the hall”.

The story of Robert Englund and Luke Skywalker

So Englund went over, and one of the names on the audition sheet caught his attention. “What a name. I’d never heard the name before; I didn’t know what it meant, just the coolest name in the world, Luke Skywalker.” As a character actor, Englund never thought the role was right for him.

As Englund told People magazine, auditioning to play a character in a galaxy far, far away was not as exciting as some might think. “All they did was take a Polaroid of me.” However, he went back to his apartment where, well, who else could be there but Mark Hamill? The future Luke Skywalker was drinking Heineken and watching Bob Newhart when Englund told him about the role. This prompted Hamill to phone his agent.

“Now his agent, I believe she already had him up for the role,” Englund recalls. “And that may be true, I don’t know, but I know that Mark hadn’t heard about it yet. And I did tell him about it, and he got on the phone. That’s the story.”

Meeting Freddy Krueger

Robert Englund also shares his own ghostly encounter with Freddy Krueger. The horror icon, who has played the villain in A Nightmare on Elm Street several times since 1984, also talks in the same interview about an incident that “burned” into his memory. While promoting his new documentary, Englund told of an eerie moment that happened during the filming of the first film in the franchise.

As they often filmed at night, he sometimes rested in costume. On one of these occasions, after suddenly waking up, forgetting where he was and what he was doing, he was almost heartbroken when he saw his own Krueger’s lapel in the mirror! Englund revealed that, although he has no nightmares about it, it is a moment he relives occasionally. “Sometimes at night” he remembers.

Source: People (1, 2)