Mark Hamill Pays Tribute to Carrie Fisher, Speaks of Their Very First Meeting

Mark Hamill (who plays Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars franchise), wrote a tribute for Carrie Fisher after her tragic death last week.

In his guest column for THR, the 65-year-old actor wrote of their first time meeting.

“So I said to the production office, ‘I’d like to meet her before we work together.’ They worked out that we’d meet for dinner. You know, she was 19 years old at the time. I was a worldly 24. So I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’ll be like working with a high school kid.’ But I was just bowled over,” Mark wrote. “I mean she was just so instantly ingratiating and funny and outspoken. She had a way of just being so brutally candid. I’d just met her but it was like talking to a person you’d known for ten years. She was telling me stuff about her stepfather, about her mom, about Eddie Fisher – it was just harrowing in its detail. I kept thinking, ‘Should I know this?’ I mean, I wouldn’t have shared that with somebody that I had trusted for years and years and years. But she was the opposite. She just sucked you into her world.”

Click inside to read more from Mark Hamill…

“I’m grateful that we stayed friends and got to have this second act with the new movies. I think it was reassuring to her that I was there, the same person, that she could trust me, as critical as we could sometimes be with each other. We ran the gamut over the years, where we were in love with each other, where we hated each other’s guts. “I’m not speaking to you, you’re such a judgmental, royal brat!” We went through it all. It’s like we were a family,” Mark continued.

“When you were in her good graces, you couldn’t have more fun with any person on the planet. She was able to make you feel like you were the most important thing in her life. I think that’s a really rare quality. And then you could go 180 degrees opposite, where you were furious with one another and wouldn’t speak for weeks and weeks. But that’s all part of what makes a relationship complete. It’s not all one sided. Like I say, she was a handful. She was high maintenance. But my life would have been so much drabber and less interesting if she hadn’t been the friend that she was,” Mark added.