Mark Hamill says he pitched George Lucas on Boba Fett being Luke Skywalker's mom

By Randall Colburn  |  November 19, 2018 | 6:55pm
Aux Features Boba Fett

Earlier this year, Mark Hamill worried that there might be just a few too many Star Wars movies in development, a concern that Disney eventually came to share. Hamill, however, might still have been bummed to hear that James Mangold’s Boba Fett movie was one of the casualties. Why? Because that may have been Hamill’s last shot at getting someone to bring his own vision for the character to life. Hamill revealed on Twitter this weekend that he once pitched George Lucas on the plot twist that Boba Fett was not the ruthless bounty hunter we thought, but actually a disguise adopted by Luke Skywalker’s true mother.

“Then there was the time I pitched Boba Fett as Luke’s mother,” Skywalker himself tweeted. “I have always been more than willing to generously share my many, many terrible ideas in the off-chance we might stumble across one that could actually be useful. At the time, I didn’t even know Leia was my sister.” He added that, for him, it was “the only way we could top Vader being my father. I envisioned her as a double-agent working clandestinely for the Rebels. SPOILER ALERT: He didn’t like my idea.”

The reveal was prompted by an inquiry from Tatooine Suns: A Star Wars podcast, who, in discussing the fan theory, found one of their hosts attributing it to Hamill. That host might have been recalling a 2004 interview with CHUD, when Hamill (presumably) first shared the news publicly.

“It seemed to me that after revealing that Vader was my father they desperately wanted to top that, which you can’t do!” he said at the time. “The audience is expecting the unexpected. I kept thinking that Boba Fett would take off the helmet, shake out her hair, and it’s my mother! You would go, ‘Wow, a double agent!’

In that same interview he said that, like many fans, he thought “they jettisoned Boba way too arbitrarily. He was built to be this awesome bounty hunter that was badass and everybody was afraid of him, and what, you flip a switch on his backpack and whooo!”

While Lucas never capitalized on Hamill’s idea, he did almost give Fett a family connection to the Skywalkers while in the prequels. As revealed in Skywalking: The Life And Films Of George Lucas, the creator considered making Anakin Skywalker and Fett stepbrothers, but eventually scrapped the idea. Thankfully, the bounty hunter lives on in the Star Wars Legends expanded universe, and one can imagine his presence will no doubt be honored, if not directly referenced on Jon Favreau’s upcoming The Mandalorian.

 
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