Mark Hamill Remembers Empire Strikes Back As The Most 'Grueling' Film In The Star Wars Franchise

During reshoots for the original "Star Wars" movie in early 1977, Mark Hamill (who plays Luke Skywalker) famously got into a real-life car accident that left him with a broken nose. Behind-the-scenes lore tends to exaggerate the extent of his injuries. As the story goes, the wampa attack and bacta tank recovery that Luke Skywalker undergoes at the beginning of the sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back," was a way for the movie to account for the change in Hamill's facial appearance. However, while his nose did need to be reset (and various sources indicate that it had to be repaired with cartilage from his ear), Hamill himself told the BBC in 1980 that his injuries weren't that bad. "Over the period of years," he said, "it's built up into having my face reconstructed with plastic surgery."

Yet this wouldn't be the last time Hamill sustained an injury during the production of a "Star Wars" movie. In a way, his car accident may have actually served as an intense primer for the physical demands of "The Empire Strikes Back." Earlier in the same BBC interview, Hamill discussed how "The Empire Strikes Back" was a "physical ordeal" for Luke Skywalker, in part because he had to confront Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel.

"I have to look like an expert swordsman," Hamill said. "Which I'm not. So, for four and a half months before we started filming, I started five days a week with karate, kendo — which is Japanese swordplay. I did some weightlifting, and I took fencing."

Hamill also credited the British stuntmen on "The Empire Strikes Back" for making him look good. But unlike Darth Vader, he wasn't wearing a helmet, which meant that they couldn't use a stand-in and he had to perform his own stunts.

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.