Mark Hamill Mistook George Lucas For Someone Else At His First Star Wars Audition
There's a billion bits of "Star Wars" trivia out there, but one of my favorites is actually from before a single foot of film ran through the camera. You have to remember that, though "Star Wars" is a multi-billion dollar IP now, the original film barely got made. George Lucas had success with "American Graffiti," but this was a script that nobody in Hollywood understood, even Alan Ladd Jr., the Fox exec who gave the film a greenlight.
Lucas's world-building impressed most people, but they just didn't understand the technobabble jargon in a genre that was predominantly either super serious like "2001" or extra campy like "Barbarella." "Star Wars" existed somewhere between the two and that threw everybody, from studio execs to the actors auditioning for the movie, for a loop.
This was also an era pre-internet, so when Hamill went in to his first meeting for the role of Luke Skywalker he had no idea what George Lucas looked like despite being a fan of his previous movies, and he walked out of it not even aware he met with the proposed director of this space movie, a story he told to Wired back when he was promoting "The Machine."
Why the confusion? Well, "Star Wars" happened to be holding these meetings at the same time as another movie was holding their auditions, so much of the cast read for both films. So, Hamill knew he talked to Brian De Palma, who was casting "Carrie" at the time, and just assumed the quiet guy next to him who didn't say a word the whole meeting was De Palma's assistant. That, of course, ended up being George Lucas.
If things had gone differently we would have had Amy Irving as Princess Leia
Hamill insisted that this first meeting wasn't him actually reading lines yet, but it went well enough that he came back for the actual reading, where he ended up performing some lines with Harrison Ford and, eventually, Carrie Fisher.
De Palma's auditions for "Carrie" were still happening simultaneously and tons of people who ended up in "Carrie" read for "Star Wars" and vice-versa. William Katt (and his glorious '70s perm) tried out for Luke, but ended up getting to play Carrie's prom date instead.
There's just something really fun about the collaboration between two projects that would each go on to become one of the most iconic horror movies of all time and one of the biggest franchises of all time, all because De Palma and Lucas knew each other and realized they were looking for a similar age range for their lead roles.
"Carrie" stars Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, and PJ Soles all read for the part of Princess Leia and in some alternate world they may have booked it and franchise filmmaking would have looked considerably different, but I guess appearing in the movie that would put Stephen King on the map ain't a bad consolation prize.
The whole concept of running parallel auditions speaks to the brotherhood of that era of Hollywood and also seems like a good idea anyway. Why make actors schlep all around town to audition when they can knock out two in the same spot?
Anyway, it's very funny that Mark Hamill had no idea he met the man who would forever change his professional life.