In The Life of Chuck, the new film from director Mike Flanagan and based on the story by Stephen King, Tom Hiddleston stars as Chuck, a man whose life is told in reverse. Alongside him, Mark Hamill plays a character full of contradictions—someone who rhapsodizes about the beauty of math while telling others to abandon their artistic dreams and pursue safer careers.
That moment hit home for Hamill, who said the advice felt all too familiar. “It was relatable because I remember telling my parents what I wanted to do. They said, ‘You’re out of your mind. What are the odds? We don’t know anybody in show business.’ So that’s common advice because the odds are against you.”
Despite that, Hamill found early inspiration in live theater. During his final years of high school, while living in Japan with his family, he convinced his father to take him on trips to New York. “I begged my father and he took me on two trips to New York where I would see theater by myself. I saw, I don’t know, half a dozen shows and it made it more real to me because they were real people,” he said. “I’d find out where the stage door was and… I just wanted to see them in real life, in their street clothes. I was that intense about it.”
In the film, Hamill delivers one of the longest and most complex speeches Flanagan has ever written. The director admitted he was initially nervous to throw such a “volume of words” at an actor, but Hamill took it seriously from day one.
“Luckily, I got it like a month in advance so I could work on it every single day,” he said. “I’d read it out loud or try and find the through line where he’s extolling the joys of math.”
One line in particular gave him trouble, until he found his own unique (and kind of hilarious) way in. “I was having a hard time making a jump from one line to the other,” he explained. “One line was, ‘Just think you could go to dinner and figure out how much it costs for everybody to eat. And it’s good for your brain.’ And I said, ‘How do I make that jump?’ Then it hit me: eat brain. So, in the side, I wrote ‘zombie.’ Because I’ll do that. I mean, anything to help me remember lines. I do cartoons, really bad puns. The worse, the better, because you’ll always remember them.”
Even after all that preparation, Hamill was still so connected to the script that when Flanagan cut a single line, he noticed. “Every word he wrote was, to me, perfection,” Hamill said. “And so if you take a line out of it, it deprives the audience of the full impact because he’s a wonderful writer as well as a director.”
