You might not have known this, I know I didn’t, but Robert Englund, the guy that essentially made Freddy Krueger who he is, once auditioned for the part of Han Solo. What’s more, he convinced his friend Mark Hamill to audition for the role of Luke Skywalker. Maybe the world should be sending Englund a big Thank You card right now and giving him a big, sloppy kiss. Apparently Hamill had been couch-surfing at Englund’s for a while when Robert when in to audition, and was seated with a six-pack watching the Mary Tyler Moore Show when Englund came home and told him about the script. Hamill agreed to audition, and the rest is history.
While I honestly couldn’t see Englund as anything but a creepy-looking alien Hamill was definitely given the right part when he auditioned for Luke. To think that this moment might have passed without Robert Englund telling his pal about it is something that seems to validate the existence of fate and what it really means. Sure others would say that this was the work of this or that deity and driving force in a person’s life, but let’s just keep it simple and say that it was meant to be. After all there was really no one else at that time who could have pulled that role off, and in the present time there’s no one else we can think of that might have handled the role so perfectly.
Luke was after all just a farm boy that had aspirations to be something better. He knew somewhere deep down inside that there was something more for him outside of his uncle’s moisture farm, he just didn’t know what. Hamill had that perfect faraway look in his eyes that exemplified the character and gave life to someone that didn’t know much except that he wanted out. His continued naivete really helped throughout the movie since he seemed pretty clueless for a while until Kenobi keyed him in to what was really going on and what he had to do. It would be a lot for anyone to take in but we don’t tend to see a lot in the film since they do jump from one scene to another without describing just how much time has elapsed between each shot. That could mean that Luke has taken a good deal of time to at least try and absorb the things that Kenobi is telling him and practicing with the remote.
Plus each film has at least a few years of time pass in between each portion of the story, meaning that he would have had time to finally shed a lot of that farm boy mentality. By the third film in the original trilogy he was no longer the unsure and uncertain kid from Tattooine, he was a confident and very powerful Force-user that was ready to take on the dark lord of the Sith, Darth Vader. Of course that didn’t mean he was ready for Palpatine yet.
Thank you Robert Englund for making the right call.
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