Mark Hamill Does Mike Flanagan's 'Favorite Acting' Of His Career In Life Of Chuck [ATX Festival]
Mark Hamill is reuniting with Mike Flanagan for a future project, and according to the filmmaker, it could be the performance of a lifetime from the "Star Wars" star. Flanagan spoke briefly about working with Hamill during a panel at Austin's ATX festival recently, and /Film's Ryan Scott was there to report back.
The panel in question was titled "The Monologue Case Study," and it featured a closer look at some of writer-director Flanagan's most memorable, loquacious cinematic moments. At one point in the question and answer session, an attendee asked the "Midnight Mass" filmmaker if he's ever written monologues that he's later had to cut, and he admitted he has. "Mostly, with the writing, it's my fault," Flanagan said, noting that sometimes he realizes during the edit that a sequence is better with less explanation or commentary.
Luckily, that's apparently not the case with his unnamed upcoming collaboration with Hamill, which is almost certainly the upcoming Stephen King adaptation "The Life of Chuck." The film stars Hamill, Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Karen Gillan, and it wrapped last November, placing it in the right timeframe for the tease he shared at ATX. "I just did a movie this past fall that I'm very proud of, it has a real doozy of a monologue in it that Mark Hamill delivers," Flanagan told the crowd. Apparently, it's a pretty lengthy speech, and an impressive one at that. "It's my favorite piece of acting I've ever seen from Mark Hamill, it's four and a half minutes. It's just — yes!" Flanagan declared.
Mark Hamill has a four-and-a-half minute monologue that Flanagan called 'a doozy'
While it's possible that the filmmaker meant it's his favorite performance he's seen while working personally with Hamill (the actor played the terrifying family lawyer Arthur Pym in Flanagan's recent Netflix horror show "The Fall of the House of Usher"), it seems plausible that he could also be including performances he's seen on screen. Could this new role really put Luke Skywalker, The Joker, and Fire Lord Ozai to shame? We won't know for sure until the film hits theaters, but given Hamill's track record with Flanagan — and Flanagan's track record with King adaptations — it seems likely that it'll be great.
During the ATX panel, the filmmaker actually brought up Hamill as an example of a monologue that apparently did make it into the movie, though he noted that there were other tough calls made in the editing bay. He admitted that one actor did a seven minute long monologue that turned out exactly the way Flanagan had wanted, yet was still cut from the movie when he realized he could communicate the same point solely via reaction shots. "I had to call the actor and say 'I'm sorry, you did it right, I messed up,'" Flanagan recalled. "'I wrote a scene that said out loud a bunch of stuff that I shouldn't have said out loud because it was all there, and it was all there without the words.'"
Still, it sounds like the film, much like Hamill's monologue, could be "a doozy." When production wrapped last November, Flanagan took to X (formerly Twitter) to celebrate, calling "The Life of Chuck" a "tenacious little miracle of a movie" and noting that he's "elated that it's going to exist in the world." The novella adaptation does not yet have a release date.