Mark Hamill wanted Luke’s deleted Biggs scene restored. Here is what it reveals about his plans to leave Tatooine and join the Imperial Academy.
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Mark Hamill has been candid in the past about his concerns over Luke Skywalker’s portrayal in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and given how divisive that film ended up being, it seems many fans also had their own concerns about how the sequel trilogy handled this famous character. However, in a 2014 AMA thread on Reddit, long before The Last Jedi came out, a fan asked Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill if there was anything he would have changed about Star Wars: A New Hope. Hamill responded by saying he would have kept a “scene at the beginning of the first movie that was cut out” that shows some of Luke’s local friends, gives us a longer glimpse of his best friend (and future X-Wing pilot) Biggs and reveals Luke had plans to join the Empire.
The scene cut from Star Wars: A New Hope begins with Luke noticing the battle with the Star Destroyer and the Tantive IV in orbit via macro binoculars and then running into Tosche Station, the location referenced but never seen in the final cut. There, he runs into Camie and Fixer, two characters that are nominally his friends.
We say nominally because Camie has nicknamed Luke “wormy” and they don’t seem to like Luke that much, but he is pleasantly surprised to see Biggs Darklighter, his best friend and eventual fellow pilot in the later attack on the Death Star in Star Wars: A New Hope.
Biggs has been training as a pilot for the Empire but confesses to Luke that he plans to defect to the Rebels as soon as he gets the chance. Luke, meanwhile, is quite ready to join the Empire if it means getting him off Tatooine, and on Reddit, Mark Hamill wrote that for Luke, “joining the empire is even attractive to him.” It’s kind of shocking to imagine Rebellion hero and future Jedi Master Luke Skywalker willingly joining the Empire, but this is in line with even what we see in the final cut of Star Wars: A New Hope.
The “academy” Luke wants to apply to and Uncle Owen keeps pushing back on is, in fact, an Imperial Academy. Luke wanted to join the Empire all along in Star Wars: A New Hope.
Hamill wrote that the scene was cut because it slowed things down a bit too much, but he is sad that we didn’t get to see how apolitical Luke is at the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope. He’s excited about the idea of joining the Empire to escape Tatooine, and when he hears that Biggs will defect to the Rebels, he’s excited about possibly joining them. It’s only after the Empire murders his aunt and uncle that Luke firmly turns against them and decides to join the Rebellion.
This means that the primary reason the Rebels ended up with a Jedi Master instead of the Empire getting a new Sith Lord is Stormtroopers finally managed to hit their targets.
Biggs actor Garrick Hagon offered another perspective in a StarWars.com interview. He recalled shooting the Anchorhead exterior in a single day during the cast’s week on Djerba, with the worn costumes and real desert heat helping the place feel lived in. Unlike Hamill, Hagon agreed with Lucas’s decision to cut the sequence and keep the opening moving. The footage did eventually escape the cutting-room floor: Hagon noted its release on the 1998 Behind the Magic CD-ROM and the 2011 Blu-ray set. That gives fans a way to compare the impatient farmboy we met in theaters with the more socially awkward teenager his friends knew.
While this scene was cut from Star Wars: A New Hope, you can read about it in the novelization of the movie. And The Book of Boba Fett actually includes a reference to this lost scene: in the second episode, two of the locals getting harassed by bikers are named Camie and Fixer. Between these characters appearing in this show and a CGI young Luke Skywalker showing up on The Mandalorian, maybe these characters can finally appear onscreen together sometime soon.
