After a strange car accident on January 11, 1977, Mark Hamill was left with a shattered nose and left cheekbone. During the treatment, doctors used cartilage from Hamill’s ear to reconstruct his nose.
The car accident occurred four months before the release of his then-upcoming sci-fi film Star Wars: A New Hope, indicating that he was not yet a household name. The news of the actor’s accident did not receive extensive publicity in newspapers or on television because he was a lesser-known actor.
However, things changed radically once the picture premiered on May 25, 1977, with audiences stunned by Hamill’s portrayal of Luke Skywalker.
Mark Hamill’s Automobile Accident
During a press tour for his film Corvette Summer, which was released between A New Hope and its sequel The Empire Strikes Back in the 1980s, Hamill discussed his accident. During a 1978 interview with Gossip Magazine, he discussed his accident.
Before becoming famous, Mark Hamill was involved in a vehicle accident.
“What occurred was that I got on the incorrect motorway,” Hamill explained, adding that he was speeding at 65-70 miles per hour near a forest with no cars or traffic.
The popular actor said that his attempts to “navigate an off-ramp” caused him to lose control of his vehicle, which flipped over and skidded off the road.
He was supposed to reshoot for A New Hope the next day, but director George Lucas decided to employ a body double due to his automobile accident. Interestingly, Hamill’s character, Skywalker, was attacked by a Wampa in the opening sequence of The Empire Strikes Back, leaving him significant face injuries.
As a result, this particular action sequence has remained one of the greatest cinema mysteries to date, with movie aficionados still debating the fight scene’s meaning.
According to rumors, director George Lucas rewrote the script to give a plot to explain the scars on Hamill’s face, obfuscating his real-life accident.
Mark Hamill’s co-star and director, on the other hand, had a different opinion. Skywalker’s dramatic struggle with a Wampa, which attacked Hamill’s character and clawed him in the face, opens The Empire Strikes Back.
After the creature took Skywalker into its cave, the sequence came to a conclusion. Lucas claimed in the movie’s Blu-ray commentary that the Wampa scene helped legitimize Hamill’s new look.
He did, however, claim that the sequence was not written to include his vehicle crash. Skywalker and his allies were involved in multiple fights throughout the course of the novel, he added, justifying his new look.
“There’s a part in the movie when Mark [Hamill] is beaten up by a monster, which helps even more,” Lucas noted, “but it wasn’t really the purpose of why we wrote the monster in the first place.”
He went on to remark that the movie needed suspense at the start while the Empire searched for Skywalker.
During her commentary, though, late actress and Hamill’s co-star Carrie Fisher remembered things differently.
She said that the fight sequence was purposely altered in the film’s script to explain his post-accident appearance.
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