Mark Hamill’s single favourite movie of all time: “Right up at the top”
It must be tough for Mark Hamill to be forever defined by one landmark role.
Try as he might, he just cannot shake off the immortal Luke Skywalker, even after nearly half a century since Star Wars first landed in the pop cultural landscape like a crashed TIE Fighter, unleashing cinema’s biggest ever global phenomenon. And it was ‘big’. Injecting a jolt of giddy optimism and clear good guys/bad guys moral tales amid a national malaise and a matching Hollywood of dark feature offerings, director George Lucas’ little Buck Rogers space opera surpassed all expectations.
Except perhaps Hamill. At the time, a fresh-faced 24-year-old only just eking out a career in TV, Hamill sensed the shining fun and atypical fantasy at play, leaping out of Lucas’ script. Gripped by its humour, character universality and imaginative sequences unlike anything yet depicted in film, Hamill eagerly wangled his way out of the contractual obligations for ABC’s Eight is Enough show to commit to Lucas’ interstellar quest in earnest.
His gamble paid off handsomely. Before long, Star Wars cemented the summer blockbuster model for the studios to wrest control back from the film school kids, was a worldwide mammoth hit, and Hamill’s likeness was slapped on a myriad of action figures and official merchandise. He’d made it. Yet, with virtual overnight stardom, Hamill found himself frozen in the role’s double-edged Carbonite, forever set in the eyes of the world as the Tatooine farmer boy turned Jedi Knight, a professional fate that similarly stuck Princess Leia’s Carrie Fisher with a fork in the road.
Yet, better to be the face of a veritable silver screen monster than never cast at all. While forging a respectable second career as the voice behind The Joker in various Batman cartoons and video games, Hamill’s career will always be defined by his lightsaber duels with Darth Vader, a piece of modern-day cultural fable that few actors can ever confidently claim.
It was all there in the script he first read way back in 1975. Hedging his bets with the space epic, a lifelong love of fantasy ultimately pulled Hamill toward his destiny a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
So, what is Mark Hamill’s favourite movie?
It was a question put to him by Letterboxd during the red carpet perusal among the attendees to 2025’s Academy Governors Awards. As well as reeling off the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo, the Our Gang ‘Little Rascals’ shorts, and the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, Hamill reached back to one of the foundational special effects marvels from Hollywood’s golden age as his all-time movie number one.
Explaining, “Well, right up at the top would be the black-and-white King Kong from 1933, because that captured me as a little kid and said, ‘I want to be in a business where they make dinosaurs come to life.’”
As good a reason as any. Capturing the imaginations for decades after its original debut, RKO’s iconic tale of the giant ape’s terrorising New York City, and the romantic fascination with Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow scream queen, are many a future actor, director, and special effects guru’s big bang, planting a thousands seeds that would fruit into Hollywood’s next generations of horror and fantasy maestros. Many remakes and rubbery Kaiju wrestling matches would follow, but no reimaginings quite captured the magic of King Kong’s introduction to film nearly 90 years ago.
