It’s called acting.
If it weren’t for his role as Luke Skywalker in a little franchise
called “Star Wars,” Mark Hamill would easily be better-known for the
many, many famous characters he’s brought to life as a voice actor than a
live-action performer. Moreover, Hamill knew he wanted to do voice acting as a
job at a very young age, well before he picked up a lightsaber and piloted an
X-Wing fighter for the first time.
Hamill’s voice acting career dates back to the early 1970s, starting
with his guest roles on “The New Scooby-Doo Movies” (which, despite
what its name suggests, is really a TV show with hour-long episodes). He would
later voice Luke in the animated segment of the infamous “Star Wars
Holiday Special,” titled “The Story of the Faithful Wookiee,”
before lending his vocals to the character for the radio drama versions of
“Star Wars: A New Hope” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” Of
course, it wasn’t until he voiced Joker on the beloved “Batman: The
Animated Series” in the early ’90s that Hamill’s career as a voice actor
really took off.
Around the time Hamill started voicing the Clown Prince of Crime, he
also branched out into the world of Disney Animation with roles in the cartoon
series “Bonkers” and “The Little Mermaid” (a prequel to
Disney’s animated movie of the same name). As he told NPR in 2019, the actor
was actually inspired to pursue voice-over as a career after watching a Disney
TV special about original Donald Duck performer Clarence Nash, making this a
case of things coming full-circle:
Rather than pushing his voice-acting dreams to the back of his mind, the
young Hamill used a tape recorder his dad had gifted him for his birthday to
“record ‘Dracula’ and the ‘Frankenstein’ films and Laurel and Hardy
because I was interested in their accents.” It helped that Hamill’s family
was constantly moving due to his father being in the Navy, exposing the actor
to a variety of “regional accents” and fostering his interest in the
different ways people speak and sound. Hamill also expressed his admiration for
the larger field of voice-acting and the highly-skilled artists it attracts:
Along those same lines, some would argue Hamill’s Clown Prince of Crime
is the definitive on-screen version of the Joker, live-action or animated. That
makes it all the more amusing that Hamill presumed he wouldn’t land the
villainous role due to him having played “this icon of virtue, Luke
Skywalker” and saw his audition for “Batman: The Animated
Series” as “an acting exercise,” only to panic when he got hired
for real. Let it never be said that Hamill is afraid to take the mickey out of
himself, especially when it comes to his own legacy.
