“Hold up, this was Mark Hamill?!” “Mark Hamill is completely unrecognizable…” “Did you spot him?”
That’s just a sampling of the reactions to episode 6 of Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie series, which closes with a “guest starring” credit for Hamill and sends viewers scrolling back to the beginning to find him. The Star Wars actor is hiding in plain sight in the very first scene, a prologue to the episode that focuses on a phony-baloney fortune teller named Damon Nostra (a.k.a. Greg McMurray), who claims to have the power to hear the dead. A grisly scene then plays out as a tearful young woman sits down at his séance table and reveals she can do the same. Or, rather, she can actually do it—and it’s driving her to bloody madness.
Think of it as Hamill dressing up for Halloween. “I remember saying, ‘I want to be as unrecognizable as possible,’ and since he's sort of this mysterious mystic figure, the sky's the limit,” Hamill tells Esquire in his one-and-only interview about the role. “I said, ‘I need a nose!’”
He initially wanted to go completely uncredited. “I thought it would be more fun if we could try and pull one over on the public,” he says. “Maybe somebody would say, ‘Oh, that's Mark! I recognize his voice,’ or whatever. And we just wouldn't comment on it. I love stuff like that.”
Being unmasked like the foiled villain in a Scooby-Doo episode is “no big deal,” Hamill says. He’s happy to be associated with the show, developed for TV by his now-frequent collaborator Flanagan. “I'm just knocked out by Carrie,” Hamill says. “At first, I thought, well, why would he want to redo something that's considered a classic by Brian De Palma? Then you see why, because when he can expand, he can tell you so much more about the friends at school . . . I mean, he just has the luxury of eight hours to tell this story.”
You’d need about the same length of time to walk through all of Hamill’s memorable performances, but this time we decided only to focus on the especially strange ones: the monsters, outcasts and weirdos he has brought to life in tales of the otherworldly and supernatural. It goes back a long way, to when he was just a little kid.
Mark Hamill, Boy Ventriloquist
“Here's a story I should tell you because this is a turning point in my life,” Hamill begins. “When I was a kid, I had magic tricks and I had a Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy.”
As the middle child of seven children, Hamill stood out for his obsession with 1933’s King Kong, puppets, slapstick comedy and television shows. He didn’t realize it at the time, but his destiny as a performer was beginning to take shape—prompted by his dummy.
“I'd spend hours in front of the mirror trying to learn how not to move my lips,” Hamill says, uttering the last few words through a tight, unmoving mouth. “My brother and sisters, they would laugh, but they'd laugh at me, not with me.”
Then came his big break. “I hosted a sixth grade variety show in San Diego with my dummy. I didn't really have an act. I was winging it,” Hamill says. “After the end of this two-and-a-half-hour show, I was addicted to laughter. I thought, wow, maybe I could be a stand-up comedian.”
Instead, he just became a leading man, the epitome of the hero’s journey as Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars films. Years later, he pivoted to voice acting, becoming the epitome of evil as the Joker in various Batman cartoons. The roles Hamill seems to savor the most are everything in between, the colorful supporting parts and character pieces that subsume who he is and present an entirely different person.
It all goes back to that dummy. “It really made me realize how much I craved laughter and applause and approval,” Hamill says. “It transformed me in a way.”
The Fall of the House of Usher: Arthur Pym
This is where Hamill entered the so-called Flanagan-verse. For the filmmaker’s 2023 remix of Edgar Allan Poe stories, he reached out to Hamill for the role of Arthur Pym, the ominous attorney and notorious fixer for the wealthy Usher family. He is inspired by Poe’s only completed novel, 1838’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a harrowing tale about a stowaway, a mutiny, cannibalism, and madness on the high seas.
The shadowy Pym in Flanagan’s series is said to have a grim and unspeakable history, although these specific points are only alluded to. Hamill plays him as the avatar of inhumanity. “This character is a soulless, evil sociopath, and an enabler of evil because the family is full of terrible people,” he says. “What amazed me was: Why would he think of me?”
Like the ventriloquist dummy of his childhood, Hamill says this was another turning point. “Mike came into my life at a really important time. When I finished the [Star Wars] sequels, I thought maybe this is a good time to, well … to use a word both my agent and my wife hate: retire,” Hamill says. “I probably wouldn't have announced it. I just didn't have the drive I had in my earlier years. And then out of nowhere, Mike Flanagan contacted me to do The Fall of the House of Usher.”
On the journey from Los Angeles to the Canadian film set, the actor felt, well … scared. But also invigorated. “I was on the plane on the way to Vancouver with absolutely no idea, I mean zero, how I'm going to play Pym,” he says.
He found the soul—or lack thereof—while in the make-up chair. He felt Pym would shun everything except for his dirty work. “I said to the hair people, ‘He's dedicated to his job, so the less time spent on grooming, the better. He's the guy that would want to get out of the shower, rub a towel once, and be done with it,’” Hamill recalls. “I said, ‘Make it short.’ Then I found the wardrobe, I found the glasses, I found the hat.”
In his first scene, he found the voice: a low growl. “I wanted to convey that he was sort of dead inside, that he had no soul and no sort of human emotions,” Hamill says. “I wanted him to be somebody that if you'd met him, you wouldn't want to be around him. So I just started talking in that voice, just that dead voice.”
It was not something he discussed with Flanagan ahead of time. “We were doing the scenes, we were doing different setups, and later in the day when he walked by, just as an aside, he didn't even stop, he said: ‘Love the voice,’” Hamill recalls.
The Life of Chuck: Albie Krantz
Then Flanagan called again, this time for a feature film adaptation of the Stephen King novella The Life of Chuck. Hamill’s character of Albie Krantz is the opposite of Arthur Pym. He is a mensch, an elderly accountant who loves numbers, and he’s caring for his orphaned grandchild while enjoying his winter years alongside his kind-hearted wife, played by Mia Sara (of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.)
But there are still dark tidings around the edges. Upstairs in their little Victorian house is a cupola at the end of a dim hallway, and inside you can see things you’d rather not know.
“I love Stephen King, and when Mike called me and said, ‘Oh, I'm doing another Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck, and there's something in it I think you'd be interested in. Can I send it to you?’ I said, ‘Of course,’” Hamill recalls. “As soon as I hung up the phone, I ordered it online, and I think I got it the day after or two days after. Considering Mike's resume and Stephen King's, I'm expecting the ultimate epic supernatural horror film. I was set up in the wrong way, but that made me appreciate it more because it was so life-affirming and so positive.”
This time, Hamill whited out his natural hair and mustache, aging himself to play the rumpled grandpa. “Then I found a pair of wire-rim glasses,” Hamill says. “It wasn't until I put those glasses on and looked in the mirror that I thought, ‘Oh my God, I'm a dead ringer for the Disney version of Geppetto.”
For grandpa’s big speech, extolling the certainty of mathematics in a world full of fear and confusion, Hamill was nervous about delivering the entire thing in one take. One paragraph was cut from the final film, but provides a window into how he works.
“Here's how I memorize. I'll draw cartoons in the margin, write puns, the worse the better, because you'll remember it,” Hamill says. “There was a point where he's saying, ‘And math can make you popular. You can go out to dinner and figure out how much it costs for everyone to eat.’ And then the next thought was, ‘It's good for your brain.’ I was having a real hard time memorizing it. Then I thought, ‘Oh, eat—brains.’ In the margin, I wrote ‘zombie.’”
What We Do in the Shadows: Jim the Vampire
In a May 2020 episode of the TV series about vampire roommates, Hamill turns up as an age-old bloodsucking nemesis of Matt Berry’s Laszlo Cravensworth. Like his fake medium in Carrie, this one features Hamill in a wig and colorful gown, speaking in a voice straight out of Transylvania (by way of 1930s Hollywood.)
Hamill was a fan of both the 2009 movie and the TV series, and tweeted about both several times. The showrunners took notice. “Then my agent calls and says, they want you to do a part on the show. I said, ‘You're kidding. Send me the script.’ I'm thinking I'm going to be playing the high school principal, or a neighbor who wants to complain about the odd hours they're keeping,” Hamill says. “When I got that script and it says ‘Mark Hamill: Jim the Vampire,’ I just lost it. Even his name epitomizes their kind of humor. It's not Vlad or Dmitri, it's this mundane Jim.”
The episode ends with the feud being resolved through the gift of an animatronic Big Mouth Billy Bass, which bedazzles Hamill’s ancient vampire until he realizes it’s just a cheap toy. “I'm thinking this deserves a sequel because I want my revenge,” says Hamill, who even had an idea in mind: “He got the best of me, and my idea for the storyline was he comes back in disguise and attempts to seduce Laszlo's wife. I thought that would be a great idea. I never mentioned it to the writers, and before I could even act on it, they announced that they were going to bring an end to the series.”
The Long Walk and Sleepwalkers: The Major vs. Sheriff Jenkins
Hamill had two other forays into Stephen King country, one very recently, the other long ago. In last year’s The Long Walk—based on the first novel King ever wrote, back when he was nineteen years old—Hamill played the sadistic Major who leads a group of young boys on a televised suicide marathon, meant to instill fear and a sense of grim determination in the nation at large.
Hamill had just wrapped his role when he sat beside King at the Toronto International Film Festival debut of The Life of Chuck. “What surprised me is when I went to meet him, he looks up and the first thing he says to me is: ‘The Major!’”
They have continued their social media friendship ever since, a treat for Hamill who says he has been a fan of the author ever since he saw a matinee of The Shining in 1980. “I went straight to a bookstore and bought [the book] because I thought, ‘What the hell did I just see?’” he says. “There's so much more detail in the book.”
Once again, the eyes (or eyewear) was a window to what lies within. Along with The Major’s military fatigues and cap, Hamill found a pair of mirror sunglasses that he felt, um, reflected the man himself. “I said to the director, Francis Lawrence, ‘I wonder if we can never take them off,’” Hamill says. “So much of a person's personality is in their eyes. Again, I wanted to dehumanize him. There are no redeeming qualities. He's just a sadist and he must hate people.”
The look actually calls to mind Hamill’s very first King role: a cameo as Sheriff Jenkins, investigating a savage killing in the opening of 1992’s Sleepwalkers, based on an original screenplay by King. Hamill put on similar oversized sunglasses and slicked back his hair to play the perplexed investigator, who has stumbled on the bloody trail of two shapeshifting immortals, a mother and son, who feed on the blood of virgins.
Director Mick Garris would go on to direct King’s work again in The Stand miniseries, The Shining miniseries remake, Riding the Bullet, Desperation, and Bag of Bones. But Hamill knew him first through Star Wars, since Garris started out in Hollywood as an office worker at Lucasfilm.
“I don't call it a favor. I think, if anything, he was probably doing me a favor,” Hamill says. “He said, ‘Hey, I'm doing this thing. Do you want to do such and such?" And I'm game. I like Mick so much, and I’m so glad that he's been able to realize his dreams of directing. I just had a great time.”
Hamill’s only regret is that the Sheriff doesn’t follow the trail to the end. “I sort of thought ‘Well, gee, I wish I had a bigger part.’ It's like Damon Nostra,” he says. “Having played that character, I don't want to say goodbye to him, but he's really not a part of the Carrie universe. He exists on his own.”
A Different Carrie Connection: 1976
Hamill was almost part of a different Carrie universe himself. Back in 1976, George Lucas and Brian De Palma were closer friends, and they joined together to interview the best of Hollywood’s up-and-coming actors for the two films they were about to make.
Lucas was casting for the lead roles in Star Wars, and De Palma was casting the students of Carrie, the very first King adaptation ever made. Most of the actors at the casting call read for both parts, so there’s an alternate history where William Katt becomes Luke Skywalker and Mark Hamill plays Tommy Ross, the kind-hearted but doomed king of the prom.
“On the cattle call for both Luke and Han, I went in and sat down, and basically Brian did the talking,” Hamill says. “He said, ‘Tell us a little about yourself,’ which I did for maybe two minutes. They said, ‘Thank you very much.’ When I walked out, I said to people that were managing the room, ‘Who's that little guy with Brian De Palma who doesn't talk? Is that his assistant?’ They said, ‘No, moron, that was George Lucas.’”
Hamill shrugs. “I could have been up for the part that William Katt played. Who knows? I think he tested for Star Wars. What struck me was each one of them was perfectly credible had they gotten that part.”
A half-century later, Carrie became part of Hamill’s destiny after all. Who could have seen that coming? Certainly not Damon Nostra.