Since we still haven’t seen Luke Skywalker’s face in any of the Star Wars: The Force Awakens teasers, there’s been a fan theory going around that the character might have turned completely evil. It turns out that Mark Hamill, the actor who plays the role, actually had that idea once.
Collider dug up an old episode of the defunct IFC series Dinner For Five, which featured producers, directors and actors just talking for a half hour over dinner. One show from 2005 that featured Kevin Smith, Marvel’s Stan Lee, actor Jason Lee, Hamill and J.J. Abrams, who wound up directing The Force Awakens. Hamill mentioned that he pitched the idea of Luke turning evil to George Lucas before Return of the Jedi was filmed.
“As an actor that would be more fun to play,” Hamill told Smith in the episode. “I just thought that’s the way it was going from when we finished [The Empire Strikes Back] … I’ll have to come back, but it will be I have Han Solo in my crosshairs, and I’ll be about to kill him or about to kill the Princess or about to kill somebody that we care about. It’s an old cornball movie, like World War II movies.”
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Abrams sat there and said, “Hmm.. I think 10 years from now, when Disney buys Lucasfilm, I’ll finally make Luke turn evil.” But it is interesting to see that Hamill had the idea.
(Luke did actually turn evil briefly in Dark Horse’s first Star Wars book, Dark Empire. That’s no longer canon though.)
The Force Awakens trailers do show a figure kneeling next to R2-D2, so it is possible that this figure is Luke. We won’t know for sure what Luke’s fate is until Dec. 18, when the movie opens.