“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” “Let the Wookiee win.” “That’s no moon.” Star Wars: A New Hope may be the oldest installment in the franchise, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less quotable than any of the other movies in the Skywalker saga. But recently surfaced footage featuring stars Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford’s first reading reveals a line that was cut that may have been as memorable as “I got a bad feeling about this.”
In July 2022, a Twitter user posted some obscure footage from the original Star Wars auditions featuring Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford — reading as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, the roles they would later be cast in — reading a scene from an earlier version of the New Hope script. The scene entailed a conversation between Han and Luke as they emerge from hyperspace to find that the planet “Organa Major” — an early version of what would become Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan — has been destroyed.
It took nearly half a year, but Mark Hamill finally got around to responding to the post, explaining that at the point the footage was filmed neither he nor Ford knew anything about Star Wars other than the scene they were reading. Hamill said that despite being critical of the dialog, he decided to lean in and play it as “sincerely as possible.” And he also revealed a little regret in hindsight about the scene’s final line not making the cut to subsequent versions of the script.
In the scene, Luke must sheepishly admit that he doesn’t have the amount he offered to Han to pay for his passage (Obi-Wan Kenobi, who ended up brokering the deal with Han in the movie is absent in this version of the script). Han responds by telling the young wanna-be hero that “I’m beginning to not like you.” The line, perfectly delivered in Ford’s wry deadpan is the best moment of the scene and several fans commented as such with one Tweeter calling it something that “definitely should have stayed off the cutting room floor.
Fans should be careful. If the line gets too much acclaim, it may just find it’s way into a yet-to-be-released new “Collector’s Cut” of the movie.
