Mark Hamill teases Luke Skywalker’s look and big change for ‘The Last Jedi’

It’s been so long since we’ve last seen Luke Skywalker. Sure we saw a bit of him at the end of The Force Awakens but that brief encounter doesn’t really tell us anything. A new cover for a magazine featuring Mark Hamill as the iconic Skywalker gives us a glimpse of a changed man. Luke in an all-black ensemble with red light shining on him has people talking about the lengths the Jedi Knight has changed.

Hamill himself hasn’t been that mum about what’s happened to his character since we’ve last seen him. In an interview with The Associated Press, he gives us a glimpse of what we can expect from Luke and how he’s changed as he plays a bigger role in The Last Jedi: 

“Luke changed, I think, more than the other characters in the original trilogy, from callow farm boy to a Jedi in training to finally a Jedi master. What you're talking about is what really fascinated me. Between Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens, there's just decades of history that's unknown. So I was wondering how they're going to handle all this. Now, obviously, with Force Awakens, J.J. (Abrams) had a full plate. It was inevitable that they would push me down the line. I was sorry I wasn't able to work with any of the original actors again. But it's not about us anymore. In this new one, I was saying to Rian Johnson: I need to know my backstory. It was kind of unclear. You read where he is now and what he's doing now and sort of have to fill in the blanks for yourself. So I did do a backstory myself. It's not about Luke anymore, so it's not really important. But I had to make sense of it for myself. What Rian (Johnson) came up with, I was stunned.”

The Last Jedi’s director, Rian Johnson, had to figure out where Luke was coming into the film. When he spoke to Entertainment Weekly, he said, “Figuring out where his head was at was the very first thing I had to do when writing the movie. I had to crack this. And it had to be something for me that first and foremost made sense. Why did Luke Skywalker go off to this island? That was the starting point, and that’s what the entire movie explores.”

And we’ll get to see this play out on screen when the movie hits theatres on December 15^th.