Getty Images for Disney/Gerardo Mora(ORLANDO) — In Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the plot revolves around finding the franchise’s original hero, Luke Skywalker, who’s been missing for many years. But Mark Hamill says he’s sort of handed over that role over to the new girl in town.
Speaking to ABC’s Good Morning America from the Star Wars Celebration fan event that’s currently taking place in Orlando, Florida, Hamill says that Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey in The Force Awakens and in the upcoming Star Wars movie The Last Jedi, is carrying on the tradition that the late Carrie Fisher began in the very first film as Princess Leia.
“No one had ever challenged Han Solo before, and Luke, y’know, was head-over-heels for the girl at first sight, she just took command like nobody else,” Hamill says of Fisher’s Leia. “And now for the protagonist [of the movies] to be a woman, she’s the new Luke Skywalker.”
“It was fun to see how empowering it was for girls and women then, and to see the tradition continue…it’s wonderful,” he adds. “That you can do anything, that you don’t have to be restrained by gender.”
As Hamill points out, while Fisher was the only woman in the original Star Wars, she certainly packed a punch.
He laughs, “I loved in the original that Carrie was the take-charge person — ‘You call this a plan?’ ‘Gimme that gun!’ — and made Harrison [Ford] and I look like chumps!”
Star Wars: The Last Jedi arrives in theaters December 15.
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