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Looking back on “The Empire Strikes Back” on its 40th anniversary in 2020, Hamill told StarWars.com he was eager to do his own stunts for the film, so much so that he earned official status as a member of the British Stunt Register.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said, “in those days — it’s changed as I’ve gotten older — but in those days I wanted to do every possible stunt I could. [‘Empire’] was the most physically grueling of them all because of the lightsaber duels and all that.”
The insurance company tried to reduce Hamill’s risk-taking, but he still came away with a thumb injury on the day his son was born, when he “[dove] away from an imagined AT-AT on a salt-covered soundstage.” This resulted in a shooting delay for the lightsaber duel with Darth Vader in Cloud City.
Compared to the first “Star Wars” film, with its low-key duel between Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi, “The Empire Strikes Back” really upped the ante in terms of necessary stunts. Over and above all, the times Luke locks lightsabers with Vader, we see him rolling down stairs, falling backward into a carbon-freezing chamber, jumping out into the cables above it, somersaulting back onto his feet, doing a flip over Vader, fending off Force-levitated objects, being sucked out the window, and of course, losing a hand on the catwalk in the climactic moment of their duel.
There’s no telling how much of this was movie magic and how much of it was truly Hamill. But it’s clear that, with “The Empire Strikes Back,” Mark Hamill went above and beyond the call of duty for an actor, embodying the Jedi part, performing many of his own stunts, and leaving us with one of the greatest final-act showdowns in movie history.
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