Amazing Footage Of Mark Hamill Before Star Wars Surfaces (Watch Here!)

There’s a classic meme floating around the Internet that says “Did you know that before staring in A New Hope Mark Hamill had never seen a Star Wars movie?” Sure, that gives us a chuckle as we all know that, prior to 1977, there was no other Star Wars movie. But did you know what Hamill actually did before becoming Luke Skywalker? To see Mark Hamill before Star Wars, check out the video above!

It’s hard to image imagine Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight as a scrawny little kid on The Bill Cosby Show in 1970. A year later he even appeared on the classic sitcom The Partridge Family. Perhaps his most *famous* “Mark Hamill before Star Wars” role, however, was on the long-running soap opera General Hospital. Sadly, no remaining footage of that spectacle still exists. (Frankly I’d pay good money to see it. So if you’re reading this and have access to the GH archives, send me a message.)

Mark Hamill before Star Wars

Watching this video of young Mark is both amusing and nostalgic. Because Star Wars has become as big as it is, we often tend to forget that the actors we know and love because of it had lives before George Lucas came calling. The story of Mark Hamill before Star Wars isn’t too dissimilar from those stories of his co-stars. Remember: Harrison Ford was a bit actor and carpenter before he appeared as Han Solo. (You can see a photo of him in his shirtless carpenter days in an interview video HERE.)

Video footage like this, showing Hamill before Star Wars, truly is a gem. We’re so accustomed to having videos, photos and information at our fingertips these days. There was no Internet, and we had far more limited data storage capabilities in the early seventies. That this archival footage is still around for us to see is a minor miracle. So enjoy, laugh, and reminisce.  

(Thanks to cheatsheet.com for alerting us to this video.)