10 Things We Learned From Mark Hamill At Star Wars Celebration Europe

4. He Remembers His Lines From His Original Audition

When asked what his favourite character besides Luke was (answer: Luke isn't is favourite - he was always more drawn to Han), Hamill side-stepped into an anecdote about first getting the part of Skywalker where he managed to perfectly recite a complex piece of unused jargon from the audition script; four decades on and he still remembers it (although he has probably repeated it a fair few times over the years).

That scene (a dialogue exchange in the Falcon where Han and Luke decide to go to the Death Star to save Leia) was actually the only scene he'd seen before getting the part, and in fact only discovered he was the lead when he got sent the full script. And that sounds like a real surprise - he expected the whiny farmboy to be the excitable side-kick to movie-star Harrison Ford's lead.

He also revealed that throughout filming of the first film, his character was still referred to as Luke Starkiller, including the Death Star jailbreak scene, which ended up being the first to use the final name:

“I said, ‘Didn’t we shoot that scene last week?’, and they said, ‘No, we’re changing your name. And I said, ‘OK, what is my name? I’m Luke Starkiller, that’s what I knew. And they said, ‘Luke Skywalker’. And I said, ‘Luke Skywalker? It sounds like Luke Flyswatter. I want to be Starkiller, I could use the macho.’ But people didn’t like the name having ‘kill’ in it.”