Star Wars' Laughably Horrible Attempt At Making A Fake Luke Skywalker Head
In Irvin Kershner's 1980 sci-fi epic "The Empire Strikes Back," the Rebel hero Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) travels to a distant planet called Dagobah to hone his nascent mental powers with the gnome-like sage Yoda (Frank Oz). During his training, Luke learns about the Force, the godlike spiritual energy that binds the universe together. He learns to better move objects with his mind, and also to see vaguely into the future. Yoda warns Luke that directing one's Force-inspired powers toward violence and selfish desires can lead one toward the Dark Side, a corrupting, demonic facet of the Force that encourages evil.
As a demonstration of the Dark Side, Luke has a vision in a cave. He sees a ghostly imprint of Darth Vader (David Prowse), the fascist warlock who killed one of Luke's old friends. Luke has a slow-motion duel with the masked Vader, and, in a fit of murderous anger, severs Darth Vader's head. He looks down at the mask. Without warning, it blasts open. Instead of seeing Darth Vader's face inside, however, Luke sees his own dead eyes looking up at him. He was Darth Vader. The worst evil, Luke finds, is the evil coming from within him. It's a chilling nightmare sequence in a sci-fi action picture that's already bleak and downbeat.
To achieve the effect of Luke Skywalker's severed head, as one might guess, Hamill merely poked his own head through a hole in an artificial dirt floor and pushed his face up against the blasted-open Darth Vader mask. It would, one might assume, be the most logical way to film a severed head.
Hamill revealed on Twitter in 2016, however, that an early version of the scene involved a rubber head, and not Hamill's own.
The rubber head looked quite bad.
The rejected head
In 2016, Hamill responded to a fan who asked if that was indeed his head in the "Empire Strikes Back" dream sequence. He noted that it was, saying simply that, "It was my head protruding through an opening in the set floor as I stood below — My prop head was tested but rejected."
"Star Wars" obsessives naturally had some of the test photos of the Mark Hamill prop head, and an image of it eventually surfaced in Hamill's Twitter feed the following year. One can take a look at it and judge for themselves if the filmmakers made the right choice. It's a high-quality rubber head, of course, but it doesn't look exactly like Hamill. The actor's comment: "Unused dummy head — rejected in favor of using my real head pushed up from beneath the set. Hard to keep my eyes open [with] all that smoke!"
Since Yoda was a puppet operated by Oz, the Dagobah set was already elevated, making the real-head effect that much easier to achieve.
Hamill, when playing his own severed head, had to keep his dead eyes wide open as the smoke cleared from the mask blowing open. No, his head wasn't inside the mask when it exploded, but the smoke lingered on the set. Hamill doesn't mention how many takes it took for the shot to look right, but one can imagine it wasn't too many.
Released last year, the docuseries "Light and Magic" contained a scene in which some of the men who worked for Industrial Light and Magic (the special visual effects, animation, and virtual production division of Lucasfilm) looked through an old prop warehouse in 1988, and they found the rubber head. They joked that it looked terrible and treated the prop rather indelicately.
The head's current location is unknown, although it's likely in the same ILM archive as it was in 1988.