As Jon mentioned earlier, today was a rather exciting one in the life of HeyUGuys. Never in a million years did I ever think that I’d get to interview any celebrity let alone one that is of this stature! This morning, Colin (who took all these great photos) and I headed off to The National Space Centre in Leicester, England to interview the legendary Mark Hamill who you’ll all know from from his film, Comic Book the Movie and also some franchise you might have heard of called Star Wars where he played a certain Luke Skywalker!
We’ve been given the honour to debut the news that Mark Hamill is returning back to feature films after a five year gap starring as ‘Malcolm’ in the new British movie, Airborne directed by Dominic Burns. In the movie, he stars alongside Julian Glover, Alan Ford, Andrew Shim, Simon Phillips (interview here), Gemma Atkinson (interview here) and Sebastian Street. We got to visit the set of the movie when they were shooting in Surrey a few weeks ago and you can see our set report here.
Airborne tells the story of a group of passengers who board a plane in London bound for New York. The plane is also carrying some dangerous cargo in the hold, unknown to the passengers. Throughout the flight, various strange and unexplained occurrences being to happen on-board which begin to send the passengers mad. Not knowing who to blame, they start to blame each other with fatal consequences.
I was fortunate enough to spend all day on the set with the wonderful crew and cast which also now includes Billy Murray who came on late to the project and by his own admission couldn’t resit the temptation to work with former Luke Skywalker himself! We also spoke with Murray and I’ll post that interview at a later date.
I got to speak with Airborne’s director Dominic Burns who spoke to me about the movie:
When you work with people you’ve looked up to your whole life it’s a very nerve-racking experience because they might destroy your hopes and dreams of what they may be like. Mark is the complete opposite of that, he is everything you want him to be, and more. He’s one of the nicest guys, an incredible actor, he’s passionate about what he’s doing. He’s everything you hope he would be. For me, it’s a genuine dream come true to work with him, I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed working with him.
I also spoke to one of the Producers of Airborne, Patricia Rybarczyk who said:
Having Mark on board with the project is fantastic. He was on our wish list for quite some time and actually getting him on the movie has been a dream come true.
While I was waiting to interview Mark, something rather surreal happened which has to be posted here. As I mentioned before, filming took place at the National Space Centre in Leicester and that facility hires out their rooms for private parties. As we were waiting for Mark, a fancy dress party was about to kick off and we all watching in amazement as Darth Vader, multiple Princess Leia’s, a Wookie, Darth Maul and numerous Storm Troopers all began to walk past. I managed to get a photo with Darth Vader as you can see. Little did they know that the real Luke Skywalker was in the trailer that they were all walking past! Completely surreal! It really struck a cord and Colin and I discussed in detail, what would the world be like if Star Wars has never existed?! Fortunately, we’ll never know.
Anyway, enough of that, check out my interview with Mark Hamill below!
During the interview we discuss how he came to work on Airborne and where out updates from his own project, Black Pearl which we’ve not heard anything on in a while. The movie sounds like it could end up embroiled in some sort of a trilogy but it’s all a little up in the air at the moment and quite surprisingly that delay seems to have come because of the UK Government’s decision to scrap the UK Film Council (which provided funding most recently for the Oscar Winning Best Picture, The King’s Speech). The second film is written by Paul Tamasy (who is co-writing Black Peal with Mark) and would star Hamill as the villain in the movie. He also tells us about how he was worried when Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass came out that it might clash with their idea but after seeing the movie (and loving it) he wasn’t so worried!
Airborne is due for release November 2011 and we’ll be bringing you more from the production until it’s release.
Apologies about the quality of the video, we shot it in Mark’s trailer and the lighting wasn’t great and I’ve upped the brightness but hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it! I’ve left into the opening banter as it was such fun and just shows how much Mark loves his movies and has numerous stories to tell.
