Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher of course played (very old spoiler alert) family in the Star Wars films, but in a tribute to the late Fisher that Hamill just published in The Hollywood Reporter, the actor explained how much that dynamic spoke to their real-life relationship, from deep comfort, to oversharing, to tumult, to love. The world recently saw the two reprising their roles of Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker for The Force Awakens, and prior to Fisher’s death on December 27, they’d finished filming their scenes for Star Wars VIII. Hamill mentions how grateful he was to have the chance to act with her again.
In his tribute, he also describes how they both experienced sudden fame at the same time — and how they felt like a “garage band…that somehow hit it huge.” The first time they met, he recalls, was in London before filming on the first movie began, when she was 19 and he was 24. He writes, describing the same kind of openness that audiences/readers would come to know and deeply appreciate in her stage performances/books:
I was thinking, “Oh my God, it’ll be like working with a high school kid.” But I was just bowled over. I mean she was just so instantly ingratiating and funny and outspoken. She had a way of just being so brutally candid. I’d just met her but it was like talking to a person you’d known for 10 years. She was telling me stuff about her stepfather, about her mom, about Eddie Fisher — it was just harrowing in its detail. I kept thinking, “Should I know this?” I mean, I wouldn’t have shared that with somebody that I had trusted for years and years and years. But she was the opposite. She just sucked you into her world.
He describes, in detail, the ends to which he’d go to make her laugh (doing so was, he says, “a badge of honor”) – recalling a particular time when she dressed him in her one-piece white jumpsuit and “one of those bald cap masks with the Bozo hair and glasses and nose” and paraded him around the back lot.
Hamill openly notes that their relationship wasn’t all highs, but emphasizes that the lows made the relationship “complete”:
We ran the gamut over the years, where we were in love with each other, where we hated each other’s guts…We went through it all. It’s like we were a family.