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

3. When First Reading The Force Awakens He Thought He Would Catch The Lightsaber In The Forest

I've long made the joke that when he first read the script for The Force Awakens, Hamill would have read it with overwhelming glee - "Oh man, your boy Luke's the first line of the crawl, this is gonna be big for you Mark!" - before the truth slowly dawned on him. So I was positively beaming when he told the experience of reading the screenplay EXACTLY like that.

It took him a while to figure out he wasn't in the film at all, however - every page he expected the big reveal. When the lightsaber flies past Kylo Ren in the forest on Starkiller Base, he genuinely expected to see Luke grab it.

“When the lightsaber flew off, I was like ‘What a great entrance'. And then I was like, ‘Rey caught it? She hasn’t even been to Dagobah for her training.’”

Not that he's too sore about it, it was more an element of surprise; he said he'd been in training and lost weight for the role, so for it to be a single-scene gambit was a bit of a shock.

"I don’t think they prepared me properly. I went into training, lost all this weight, and thought, ‘I must be doing something physical if they’re sending me to the gym twice a week and torturing me physically like this.’”