Adedokun Waliyu 
Mark Hamill promised his wife he wasn’t going to talk politics at Toronto’s Fan Expo. But with U.S. President Donald Trump signing an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America this week, he couldn’t resist.
Hamill, in town to celebrate Fan Expo’s 30th anniversary in the city, ribbed one attendee dressed as Star Wars character Ahsoka Tano.
“Where did you get that orange colour? The White House?” Hamill, 74, quipped. “I’m in the escapism business, so I promised my wife, ‘I’m not going to bring up politics … No reality will come from these lips,’ but I already broke my vow.”
Later in his nearly hour-long panel, Hamill, star of one of the world’s biggest sci-fi franchises, spoke about his love for Toronto and Canada.
“It’s TURRUNO … You don’t pronounce the second ‘t’ … Not only do I love Canada, I’ve filmed more in Vancouver over the past 20 years than I have Los Angeles. It’s a great city, as is this,” the Oakland native said, before dropping into a whisper voice and adding, “Don’t mention the trade wars. Don’t mention the trade wars.”
But as a frequent critic of Trump’s, Hamill had to weigh in on the president’s ramped-up attack on Canada.
“It’s the stupidest time to be alive,” he said matter-of-factly. “Every day, I open the computer and go, ‘What has he done now?’ Oh, he wants to rename the lake.”
In the past, Hamill has mocked the president as the Joker and openly spoke about leaving America after his re-election.
“The bullying, the incompetence, the people in place… The only way I can deal with it without going crazy and wanting to open my veins in a warm tub is to look at it like a thick, sprawling political novel,” he told The Times of London last year. “It’s entertaining in a way because this could actually be the end. Our status in the world has been crippled and that will reverberate for decades. Making Canada a 51st state? Do you know how offensive that is? And then taking over Greenland and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. The distractions are hilarious.”
Hamill has been enjoying a late-career resurgence as a character actor. After doing voice work for animated projects, including a turn as the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, Hamill returned as Luke Skywalker in Lucasfilm’s last Star Wars trilogy.
He told the Toronto crowd that he thought playing Luke one final time would be “a nice exit” from a career that began in 1970 with bit parts in The Bill Cosby Show and The Partridge Family.
“After they killed my character, I thought, ‘This is probably a good ending spot,’” he said. “I’m an actor who appreciates a good entrance, but I also appreciate a dignified exit. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and wind up on Dancing With the Stars.”
Hamill called himself a lifelong lover of movies and said he wanted to do anything to be on a film set when he started out, so retirement wasn’t an option.
He said he was going to continue happily doing voice work, but he just didn’t want to be on camera anymore after he completed filming on 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. He mused that he should be wandering the beach with a metal detector.
“The only people who were against this were my agent and my wife (Marilou York), because she likes me out of the house,” he joked. “But out of nowhere, it’s been non-stop.”
Hamill credited writer-director Mike Flanagan, who cast him as Arthur Pym in the 2023 Netflix horror series The Fall of the House of Usher for keeping his acting career going.
“For him to think of me to play that soulless, evil lawyer … I thought, ‘This is the kind of part that’s routine for me in voiceover, but I never get these kind of parts on camera.’ That was a great experience for me,” he said.
Flanagan then cast Hamill again in a pair of Stephen King adaptations, last year’s The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck, which won the TIFF audience prize at Toronto’s 2024 film fest.
Now Hamill is in the midst of filming Season 3 of Twisted Metal in Toronto with Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz.
Hamill famously played Luke Skywalker in six Star Wars movies and made a cameo in The Mandalorian. But he says his time playing the character has come to an end after Skywalker was killed off in 2017’s The Last Jedi.
“It gave me such closure to the character and everything that I thought, ‘That’s great. I’ve had my time,’” he said.
Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in a scene from ‘The Last Jedi.’
With the franchise branching off in new directions, Hamill says it is time for Star Wars to continue telling new stories.
“I really loved The Mandalorian and Rogue One was great … Andor … So they’re doing great stuff. I just want to step back and be grateful that George (Lucas) let me be part of the original trilogy,” he said. “I don’t want to be the old timer showing up, saying, ‘Any part for me? I could be ghost or something.’ I don’t want that.”
