Ahead of his appearance on The Flash, Mark Hamill discusses his reprisal of his role as The Trickster.
Hamill, best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films, played James Jesse, The Trickster, in the 1990 Flash series. He will be reprising that role in this week’s upcoming episode, titled “Tricksters.”
Hamill says he’s been watching the new Flash series since episode 1 with his daughter Chelsea and wondered if they’d get around to the Trickster. “And then,” he says, “I got a call from my business people saying that they wanted me to do something on The Flash.”
Hamill says he expected to be asked to play “a colleague of John Wesley Shipp’s, a professor, something age-appropriate,” so was surprised to hear they wanted him to play the Trickster. However, after getting in touch with executive producer Andrew Kreisberg, he was sold.
“[T]he one thing that impressed me about the show is how smart the writing is. I mean, it’s got the fantasy element and the comic book elements but it’s really strong in characters, I think,” he says.
“The backstory of the father wrongly accused, from the very first episode that’s really a strong hold on the audience. And you get to know so much about the personal lives of these characters. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when they had such an ingenious idea as having Devon Graye play a new Trickster with me appealing to — all of these villains have unwieldy egos,” Hamill explains. “And it worked!”
He adds, “I am just so enamored of this young actor, Devon Graye… Now I’d seen Devon working and I thought he was very very good, but there was a take where he confesses his devotion for me and he was so real, it was astonishing, how troubled a kid this was.
“I’m just doing my crazy comic book guy; it’s just not tethered to reality in my mind, and he brought it so close to home in terms of how emotionally damaged he was. I’m telling you, it just moved me beyond words,” Hamill says. “I think the world of him, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s a worthy successor.”
As for reuniting Hamill with John Wesley Shipp, who played Barry Allen/The Flash in the original series, Kreisberg explains, “Well, I knew there was no point in doing this if we didn’t have Mark and John in a scene together. Early on, it was one of the things that we said, early on when we were constructing the story, that The Trickster should kidnap Henry because it was a great way to satisfy both the fan in all of us but also you want Barry to really care about The Trickster.”
And if that preview isn’t enough to get you excited for Hamill’s appearance on The Flash, Kreisberg says that we should expect to see him in the future as well. “Yes, that is the plan,” he teases. “What’s so fun for us and why we were again so grateful to Mark for wanting to be part of this is, when I sit down and I think of Wentworth Miller and Mark in a scene together and watching the dichotomy of them…”
“[W]hat was always cool about The Trickster on both series is that he was smart. No matter how crazy he was, he was smart and he thought like four steps ahead. Watching The Flash and our team going up against somebody brilliant, a lot of the times our shows are about how to chemically or scientifically or how The Flash can use his powers to stop somebody, but this time it was, they really have to outthink him.”
The Flash season 1, episode 17, “Tricksters,” airs Tuesday at 8:00 p.m. ET on The CW.