There are many ways of breaking into show business, and what works for one budding star may turn out to be the completely wrong approach for another. This is something that Mark Hamill surely realized when the advice he once gave to a famed Austrian bodybuilder on how best to make the jump into movies turned out to be woefully misguided.
In a recent Tweet, the Star Wars actor recalled an exchange with a certain Arnold Schwarzenegger back when the future Terminator had yet to cement his status as an action cinema icon.
“Arnold Schwarzenegger asked me for advice when he was just starting out. I told him to lose his accent for a wider range of roles & to change his last name since no one could pronounce it. He did the opposite & became one of the biggest stars EVER.”
While we can laugh about Hamill’s recommendations in retrospect, his advice certainly isn’t without basis. Even in today’s industry, it remains common practice for an aspiring actor to change their name to something more digestible, from Neta-Lee Hershlag adopting the moniker of ‘Natalie Portman’ to Joaquín Rafael Bottom becoming ‘Joaquin Phoenix.’
Moreover, though the Hollywood action genre would eventually be populated by a fair few foreign-accented stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, there’s little doubt that an all-American (or at least British) hero was regarded as the public preference in the early ’80s.
Needless to say, things worked out pretty well for Schwarzenegger, with his instantly recognizable Austrian accent becoming a defining part of his screen persona. And while his current star power isn’t quite what it used to be, there’ll certainly be a lot of fans keen to see what he can bring to the table when Terminator 6 comes out on November 22nd, 2019.
As for Hamill, though Luke Skywalker seemingly passed away in The Last Jedi, you can expect him to have some sort of a presence, possibly of the Force Ghost kind, in Star Wars: Episode IX, hitting theaters on December 20th, 2019.