So this doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but in a chat with EW today Mark Hamill has come clean as to what involvement he and his original trilogy co-stars have in the forthcoming series. In short: some. But it’s by no means official yet… 

“They’re talking to us.” Hamill told EW. “George wanted to know whether we’d be interested. He did say that if we didn’t want to do it, they wouldn’t cast another actor in our parts – they would write us out. I can tell you right away that we haven’t signed any contracts. We’re in the stage where they want us to go in and meet with Michael Arndt, who is the writer, and Kathleen Kennedy, who is going to run Lucasfilm. Both have had meetings set that were postponed – on their end, not mine. They’re more busy than I am.”

Hamill also tells EW that in the original conversation with Lucas about the new trilogy, he was insistent that all of his surviving key cast (Ford, Williams, Fisher, etc) should also return.

As for all those recent, wildly speculative rumours that the movies will focus on the children of those core characters, well Hamill subscribes to that theory also: 

“I’m assuming, because I haven’t talked to the writers, that these movies would be about our offspring – like my character would be sort of in the Obi-Wan range – an influential character.”

Proving once again that he’s just as big a STAR WARS nerd as all of us, Hamill also expressed full support of the in-development spin-off pictures:

“That’s really smart. Then you’re more like James Bond pictures, where they come out and it’s not an investment of a three-movie arc. It’s so rich, that universe, in terms of quirkiness. We would talk about that . We’d go like, ‘That little band that’s playing in the Cantina, what’s their story?! I mean, are they a traveling band? Are they the house band? Who’s their manager?’ They didn’t have names when we first were talking about them. Now they’re called, like, Sy Snootles – they come up with names down the road when they have to name toys.”

To read the full interview – in which Hamill also discusses what tone he’d prefer the new movies to take, who he’d like to see the spin-offs focus on, and his directorial debut SUSHI GIRL – visit Entertainment Weekly.

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