Mark Hamill almost quit acting before The Long Walk.
Mark Hamill wanted to retire from acting
The 73-year-old actor revealed that around 2019 he was no longer feeling inspired by acting and was thinking about stepping back from it but his wife and agent talked him out of it.
Speaking at San Diego Comic Con, he told Variety: “I thought this stage in my career, I’d be spending more time with a metal detector, wandering around the beach, playing with the dogs in the backyard. I said to my agent, ‘You know what? I’m not motivated anymore. I think I’m gonna just sort of retire and just do voice over.’ And the only people that rejected were my agent and my wife, because, you know, it’s good to have me out of the house.”
The Long Walk is a dystopian horror film, based on the book by Stephen King, co-produced and directed by Francis Lawrence and written by JT Mollner.
It follows a group of teenagers as they participate in a high-stakes contest where they must continuously walk or be shot by a member of their military escort.
Hamill plays a man only known as the Major, the military commander who oversees the walk and said he was drawn to the role after spending his teenage years in Japan, where his school was next to a US military base.
He said: “I said, ‘I know who this guy is: I’ve seen him firsthand’. I’d walk across the parking lot, seeing the officers putting these guys through their paces in blazing hot sun, and they were just brutal. Like if you vomit, they force you to eat it. It’s horrible.”