Hamill plays the young pilot training under an exiled master in Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back, the entry where the character stops being a straightforward hero. The performance carries the film's central reversal, and it works because he plays the revelation as physical collapse rather than as dramatic outrage.
He came from American television before the franchise and returned to theatre between films, including major stage work in New York. From the nineteen nineties onward he built an enormous second career in animation and games, where his vocal range is entirely unrecognisable from his screen work, and where he is best known for a laughing antagonist in a superhero cartoon.
Recurring subjects: disillusionment, young men who discover the story they were told about themselves is wrong, and, in his voice work, characters built on extremity of register. He plays earnestness without irony on screen and total theatrical excess in the recording booth, and the distance between the two modes is remarkable.
His screen role is one of the most recognised in cinema history, and his return to it decades later was treated as a major cultural event. His voice performance as an animated villain is regarded by many as the definitive version of that character, and he has become a central figure in the recognition of voice acting as a discipline.
For viewers who want to hear a familiar actor in roles they will never identify. Suited to anyone approaching the space opera trilogy, and to those who follow animation and games and have no idea how much of it he is in.
