“Guess what?”: Dissecting Robert Englund’s unsung and pivotal contribution to ‘Star Wars’
Rarely has a movie been as loved by kids the world over as Star Wars.
It has been that way for six decades and counting, but things would probably have been a lot less family-friendly had Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund got the part of Luke Skywalker, as, for one thing, he might have had massive, scary knives for fingers rather than a cool lightsaber.
Freddy Krueger is about as iconic a horror character as you’re going to find. He was absolutely terrifying when creator and director Wes Craven first introduced him to the screen in 1984 with the first instalment of a franchise that eventually spawned eight sequels and crossover films, and the deformed, scissor-handed monster was responsible for as many bedroom posters as he was disturbed nights of sleep.
And Englund, the man behind the mask and stripey jumper, played Krueger in eight of the nine Elm Street movies, but his career very nearly went in a completely different direction at the end of the 1970s after he’d spent years performing in theatres; not only did he miss out on one of the most important and controversial war movies in history, he also could have been on board the Millenium Falcon.
Asked by The Guardian about whether he really auditioned for Luke Skywalker and Han Solo in George Lucas’ epic, Englund revealed, “I really wanted to be in (Francis Ford Coppola’s) Apocalypse Now. I wanted to read for Chef, played by the great Frederic Forrest, but that part had been taken. They heard that I was a surfer, so I read for the surfer, but I think they thought I was too old. As I was leaving, one of the producers told me they were casting across the hall for this George Lucas space movie.”
Lucas was a hero to Englund at the time, so he decided to go along to the auditions, but the actor explained that, having taken one glance at him after arriving, they dismissed him as not looking anything like the Solo they’d envisaged, and didn’t let him read.
Englund added, “As I left, I snatched the audition sides (script excerpts) for this much younger character called Luke Skywalker. I went back to my apartment in the Hollywood Hills, and my buddy Mark Hamill’s cowboy boots were on my front porch. He was working down the hill at the CBS studios as a very successful television actor. I remember saying: ‘Guess what? George Lucas is making this space movie’.”
By doing so, Englund inadvertently changed movie history for good; Hamill became Skywalker in six Star Wars movies spanning five decades, with the first film grossing $775million on a budget of $11m in 1977. His friend Englund would have to wait a few years to land his own major Hollywood movie, which he won on the back of his work on the sci-fi TV miniseries V in 1983.
Aside from his work as Krueger, Englund went on to appear in countless horror films over the years, as well as making a memorable cameo in Netflix’s Stranger Things. Even now, as he approaches 80, he seems determined to scare the bejeesus out of as many people as possible, and his latest effort is Pinocchio Unstrung, with the veteran actor providing the voice of a twisted Jiminy Cricket.
It’s part of the ‘Poohniverse’ which came about thanks to the cult success of Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, widely considered one of the worst movies of all time, but one that still brought in $7.7m on a budget of 50 grand and has two sequels and counting.
