Luke Skywalker

• 1. Introduction

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  Luke Skywalker first appeared on screen in 1977, a teenager from a desert planet who wanted nothing more than to leave home. He was fictional, the creation of George Lucas, but the question his story planted was real: what does a person become when everything they believed about themselves turns out to be wrong? Luke is the main protagonist of the original Star Wars trilogy, and the films that followed decades later returned to him as an old man in hiding. Between those two moments lies one of the most closely examined character arcs in popular cinema. His birth name was nearly "Starkiller." His father was nearly his killer. His nephew nearly destroyed everything he built. What made Luke Skywalker the figure that endured across nearly half a century of storytelling is not the battles he won, but the ones he refused to finish.

• 2. A Name Almost Discarded

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  George Lucas considered a wide range of figures before settling on the protagonist of the first Star Wars film. Among the possibilities were a 60-year-old grizzled war hero, a Jedi Master, a dwarf, and a woman. The character who emerged was none of these. His original surname was "Starkiller," and it stayed in the script until a few months into filming. Lucas dropped it because of what he called "unpleasant connotations" with Charles Manson, who had become a "star killer" in 1969 when he murdered the actress Sharon Tate. The replacement name, "Skywalker," carried none of that weight. Other actors auditioned for the role before Mark Hamill was cast: Robby Benson, William Katt, Kurt Russell, and Charles Martin Smith all read for the part. Hamill got it, and then in January 1977, after filming had wrapped, he was injured in a car accident that fractured his nose and cheekbone and left visible scarring. Lucas wove the change in Hamill's appearance into the narrative of the next film by suggesting Luke had sustained battlefield injuries between the two stories. It was widely speculated that the wampa attack at the opening of The Empire Strikes Back was invented specifically to account for the scarring, but Lucas disputed this in the DVD commentary.

• 3. The Trilogy Arc

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  Luke begins the original trilogy living on a moisture farm on Tatooine with his uncle Owen and aunt Beru. He is an ordinary young man until his uncle purchases the droids C-3PO and R2-D2, and R2-D2 carries a hidden message from Princess Leia of Alderaan. Luke declines Obi-Wan Kenobi's invitation to leave for Alderaan, feeling bound to the farm. He changes his mind when Imperial stormtroopers kill his aunt and uncle. He joins the Rebel Alliance and, in the Battle of Yavin, switches off his missile guidance system and uses the Force to destroy the Death Star. Three years later, on the ice planet Hoth, Obi-Wan appears to him as a Force spirit and urges him to train with Yoda on Dagobah. Against both Obi-Wan and Yoda's advice, Luke abandons that training early to help his friends in Cloud City, where Darth Vader severs his hand and reveals that he is Luke's father. A year after that, Luke is a Jedi Knight who has built his own lightsaber. He surrenders himself to Vader on Endor not to fight but to pull his father back from the dark side. When the Emperor begins torturing Luke with Force lightning, Vader throws the Emperor down a reactor shaft to his death, a choice that costs Vader his life. On Endor, Luke burns his father's body and sees the spirit of Anakin Skywalker appear alongside those of Obi-Wan and Yoda.

• 4. The Sequel's Reluctant Hermit

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  Thirty years after the destruction of the second Death Star, The Force Awakens (2015) opens with Luke already gone. He had trained his nephew Ben Solo as a Jedi, but when Ben turned to the dark side and became the warlord Kylo Ren, Luke disappeared. During development of The Force Awakens, screenwriter Michael Arndt worried that Luke's presence would overshadow the new protagonist Rey. The solution was to make Luke a plot device rather than an active character. Hamill attended script readings during production, but read stage directions rather than dialogue; director J. J. Abrams said this kept Hamill involved and improved the readings for the cast. When Rey finally finds Luke on the ocean planet Ahch-To and offers him his lightsaber, he tosses it aside. He tells her it is time for the Jedi Order to end. He admits that after seeing a vision of the destruction Ben Solo could cause, he briefly considered killing his nephew; when Ben woke to find Luke standing over him with a lightsaber drawn, he felt betrayed. Luke eventually projects himself across the galaxy to the planet Crait, where he appears before the First Order to buy the Resistance time to escape, then collapses and becomes one with the Force. In The Rise of Skywalker (2019), he appears as a Force spirit, catches Leia's lightsaber before Rey can burn it, and admits he was wrong to stay out of the fight. He gives Rey his X-wing for her journey to Exegol.

• 5. Hamill and the Saturn Award

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  Mark Hamill portrays Luke in every film of both the original and sequel trilogies, as well as in the television series The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett. He won the Saturn Award for Best Actor for his performance in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Return of the Jedi (1983), and The Last Jedi (2017), and was nominated for the award for Star Wars (1977). Before The Last Jedi was released, Hamill said publicly that he fundamentally disagreed with director Rian Johnson's vision for the character; he later said he regretted the public statement and expressed willingness to help realize Johnson's vision. In The Mandalorian's season two finale, "Chapter 16: The Rescue," Luke arrives to collect the Force-sensitive infant Grogu and begin his training, destroying a group of Dark Troopers in the process. In The Book of Boba Fett, while training Grogu, Luke gives the child a choice between a lightsaber that belonged to Yoda and beskar chain mail sent by Din Djarin; Grogu chooses the chain mail, and Luke sends him back to Djarin. Grant Feely portrays Luke as a ten-year-old child in the 2022 series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

• 6. The Legends Universe

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  Following Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, most licensed Star Wars novels and comics produced between 1977 and 2014 were rebranded as Star Wars Legends and declared non-canon. Within that separate narrative universe, Luke's story extends across decades of fiction. In the Thrawn trilogy, he encounters Mara Jade, a former agent of the Emperor bound by a posthumous command to kill him; she eventually becomes his ally, and later his wife. They have a son named Ben, after Obi-Wan's alias. In the Legacy of the Force series, a rupture opens between Luke and his nephew Jacen Solo, whose radical interpretations of the Force alarm him. When Mara is murdered in the novel Sacrifice, Luke hunts her killer, eventually learning it was Jacen himself. Jacen is killed in a lightsaber duel with Luke's daughter-in-law Jaina before Luke can confront the question of acting himself. The Fate of the Jedi novels, set roughly forty years after the original film, find Luke in his sixties, deposed as Grand Master and exiled from Coruscant. In the comic series Star Wars: Legacy, set 125 years after the original trilogy, Luke appears as a Force spirit to his descendant Cade Skywalker, persuading him to rejoin the Jedi in order to defeat a new Sith Empire led by Darth Krayt.