How Mark Hamill Channeled His Childhood For One Of His Stephen King Roles

Mark Hamill has, to date, starred in three movie adaptations of Stephen King stories. First, in 1992, Hamill appeared in the horror movie "Sleepwalkers" (a part he admittedly forgot all about). Decades later, he starred in two back-to-back King releases in 2025: "Life of Chuck" and "The Long Walk." In the former, Hamill plays a kindly grandfather; in the latter, he's a brutal military officer known only as "the Major." 

Hamill's Major is assigned to oversee the titular walk, a competition where several young men have to walk indefinitely until only one of them is left alive. If they slow down or stop, they're shot, but the last man standing wins great wealth. The Major positions himself more like a demanding coach or a brutal father figure to the boys under his charge. He speaks to them with pride for having the "sack" to do the Long Walk at all. His eyes are concealed behind thick shades, because we never get a true look at the real man underneath the Major's performance (if there even is one), but Hamill's larger-than-life presence and growling voice fit well for a villain who's more of a symbol.

Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in 2025, Hamill discussed a close-to-home influence for his performance. Mark Hamill's father, William Thomas Hamill, was a long-serving U.S. Naval officer, and Hamill has described his dad as "an authoritarian" who would perform military-like inspections of Mark and his siblings' bedrooms. Living in a military household also gave Hamill, in childhood, a distant look at how far and sadistically some unit commanders push their soldiers.

In a previous 2023 interview with Esquire, Hamill mentioned he had a "troubled relationship" with his father. "[My dad] just could not understand why I love puppets and monster movies and comic books. These were all frivolous things that I should outgrow," the actor recalled. "It's funny, he was completely unimpressed with 'Star Wars.' He kept thinking I would eventually outgrow my childhood obsession with movies and get a real job."

Knowing Mark Hamill had that sort of relationship with his dad gives his role as Luke Skywalker some meta-meaning. In the original "Star Wars," Luke has friction with his Uncle Owen (Phil Brown), who wants Luke to stay on Tatooine and take over the moisture farm instead of rushing off to see the galaxy.

That's to say nothing of the famous twist that Luke's real father is the most terrifying dad there is, Darth Vader (James Earl Jones), who also has some strong ideas about what his son should be doing with his life. William Thomas Hamill never pushed Mark to join the dark side, but as Hamill told WIRED in 2023, he did want Mark to enlist in the military. Bad parenting is a cycle, and Hamill later got to play an evil dad himself as Fire Lord Ozai on "Avatar: The Last Airbender."

That said, Hamill did (in the aforementioned THR interview) push back on the idea his dad was anything close to the Major: "I don't want to give people the idea that he was a brutal taskmaster. He wasn't." The Hamill family did live on military bases, though, which gave a young Mark a look at the kind of commanding officers like the Major. 

In his THR interview, Hamill said that he "saw the Major" (metaphorically speaking) one time during his childhood on that military base. The young Hamill witnessed a particularly disgusting act of abuse towards a cadet by a drill sergeant:

"One time — and I blocked this out for years, it came back to me making 'The Long Walk' — it was 108 degrees and one kid vomited. The guy in charge gave him a spoon and made him eat it. It was so traumatic. So I know who this character is."

The Major is essentially a drill sergeant and an enemy leader all in one. He whips the boys into shape and sends them marching along to their deaths — only he and his men are the ones shooting at them. 

Note, too, that the Major is at least a generation older than the boys doing the Long Walk. (Indeed, he's the biological father of one of them, making the subtext of his character text.) Stephen King published "The Long Walk" in 1979, with the Vietnam War a fresh memory, and the story has been interpreted as an allegory for a military draft: a nation recruiting and sending its next generation to guaranteed death. The Long Walk itself has no end goal but to leave one man standing, suggesting the pointlessness of war.

While the Vietnam draft is in the rearview of history, young people feeling like their future has been stolen from them, and competing in a rat race to have the chance of a comfortable life, is still a resonant theme. It's one reason why "The Long Walk" has attracted critical and audience acclaim as one of the best Stephen King adaptations out there.