Somebody goes to work an actually makes
a Daffy Duck cartoon, and I thought, I want to do that.
My mom would say things like, well, yes honey,
that is a very good Elmer Fudd impression,
but it’s not going to help you later in life
with your profession.
(Elmer Fudd laugh)
you know what, I’m going to go in there
and give the best damn joker they’ve ever heard
and they’re going to really regret the fact that they can’t
hire me
(swoosh)
– What’s up, believe nation? It’s Evan!
My one word is believe, and I believe
that you can do something special that can
help change the planet.
So to help you on your journey today we’re going to learn
from actor Mark Hamill and my take
on his top ten rules for success
(swooshing)
(upbeat music)
– As a kid I was just mad about the original King Kong
I loved all the stop-frame animation, Ray Harryhausen
pictures, and horror, and fantasy,
you know I loved all the black and white
universal films, I still do. When I realized,
I think I saw a documentary on the Disneyland show,
which it was called then, where you saw Clarence Nash
recording the voice of Donald Duck. I don’t know
if I was six, seven, but it suddenly occurred to me,
these things don’t just emerge full-blown,
somebody goes to work and actually makes a Daffy Duck
cartoon, and I thought, “I want to do that!”
I mean, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be an actor,
I thought I could, I didn’t know what I wanted to be
but I certainly wanted to be in the business
of going to work and having a colossal ape
carry a woman up the Empire State Building
I thought, you know, it was just mind-boggling to me
you know, that somebody got to do that for their profession
I don’t have a lot of people coming up and saying
you know, I should be on Broadway, I do this and that,
or I should be in movies, or whatever,
but lots of people say oh, I could do cartoons.
Listen to my Homer Simpson, well that IS good,
I like that.
(audience laughs)
But it’s, you got to be dedicated, you know,
it’s not a matter of being able to do a good Homer Simpson,
and you’re going to have a career, it’s hard work,
I go to drama classes all the time and I hate to be a
buzz kill, but I try and talk kids out of showbusiness,
(audience laughs)
Seriously, I say if there’s anything you like
as much as performing, even if you get into it
academically and become a drama teacher, or if you,
if there’s something else you like, you can still do
community theater, you can do amateur theater, you can
still perform, but I’m telling you, if you get into it
as a profession, you’re in for a lifetime of rejection,
and er, erm, unemployment, I mean, you could have,
you get seven or eight jobs and then you don’t work
for a year and a half, you know? And you start running out
of money, you have to go drive a cab, or wait tables,
or something. It’s a miserable profession. Believe me.
Please don’t do it.
(audience laughs)
And that’s not just from the standpoint that,
you know, obviously there’s probably people in the audience
more talented than me that will be stealing my jobs
if they succeed, it’s not that, it’s just that it is,
only through the, if you can’t talk someone out of
show business, then they have a shot.
I love the allure, the danger of working without a net.
You know, it’s one thing to be a tightrope walker,
if there’s a net. As opposed to being a tightrope walker
where you could plummet to your death at any moment,
and that’s the disconnect between someone who’s rational
and someone who’s just crazy enough to go into show business
and stick to it no matter what. Tenacity is almost
more important than talent. It’s equally as important,
for sure.
I really love what I do. I’m so lucky to be able to do
what I wanted to do when I was a kid, you know,
I had a little tape recorder, I would tape, you know,
I loved the sound of peoples’ accents,
Bella Lugosi, (does Bella Lugosi accent) I never dreamed why
I thought where’s this guy from, why’s he talk like that?
Hearing the Beatles’ dialects. I loved the sound of it all.
And so I would be practicing and my mom would say things
like well, yes honey, that is a very good Elmer Fudd
impression but it’s not going to help you later in life
with your profession. (Does Elmer Fudd laugh)
I haven’t played, no, I haven’t played Elmer Fudd,
but I loved Peter Laurie, I love Boris Karloff, I loved
the way he spoke, (does impression) I don’t know where
he’s from, and he’s got a slight lisp,
but I loved the sound. Laurel and Hardy, I said where’s this
guy from? Before the Internet, I know a lot of you can’t
remember this, but before the Internet you actually had
to go to the library and look things up in books.
It was very embarrassing cos I’m not really an
intellectual person, I don’t want to know about Russian
history, and ancient Rome, I said, you know, do you
have any books on the Three Stooges, you know (laughs)
But you know I like having fun.
– When you see Mark become the Joker, when he’s actually
in the recording booth, and he’s doing these voices,
he actually physically kind of twists himself
and manifests himself into joker.
(Mark laughs like the Joker)
– Mark sometimes thinks he actually is Joker, so he
just turns up and he just nails it.
In fact we wrote all the dialog to really fit into where
her was taking Joker.
– Surprise! (laughs)
(Batman groans)
– You fell for the old sick Joker gag, Batman
(female character grunts)
(noise of hitting the ground)
– [Mark] One of the things that informs the Joker
is his laugh. I remember reading the comic books
it was ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, but ho ho ho hee hee, hoho hee.
(Joker laugh)
– His laugh should be like a musical instrument
it should sort of illustrate his mood
it could be ominous and intimidating,
(intimidating joker laugh)
– It could be gleeful and wild abandon
(gleeful joker laugh)
– But I didn’t want to just have one rote laugh
(another joker laugh)
– I was driving from the first recording session, thinking
now how did I laugh? I’m on the freeways in Los Angeles
(laughs) no that’s not it (laughs) no that’s not it
Now I’m sure no one in Los Angeles would look twice at
somebody, look at that guy laughing maniacally, in his car
(Joker laughs)
– It’s actually really fun to watch him
perform the character because all the other actors
are all seated and Mark has to stand to do it,
and he gets his whole body into it.
– They used to kid me because I was the only one
who would stand up
– [Joker] Yes well, this is all tremendously boring
– They had these little you know, those separators
that you see for musicians, so your sound doesn’t
bleed into other peoples’ mics. And everybody’s
sitting down at their little music stand,
and I just thought to energize the character,
to shake my fists, and I felt I’ve got to stand up.
One thing that gave me confidence is I said,
there’s no way they’re going to cast the guy
who plays Luke Skywalker to be this icon of villainy
so I was really cocky in the sense that I knew
I couldn’t get the part. Sometimes what trips you up
is that you want it so bad your nerves betray you
and your timing’s off. You over-sell it.
Or I don’t know, it’s hard to describe.
But the one thing that I felt about Joker was,
since there’s no way I can get this, just from the
standpoint of, of, the, publicity of saying, you know,
cos, years after I did it, people kept saying, that Mark
Hamill? You know, and they’d demand on the street,
do the voice…that’s not you, is it?!
But, er, I had the confidence of knowing
that I couldn’t get it, so I said,
you know what, I’m going to go in there, give ’em the
best damn joker they’ve ever heard, and they’re
going to really regret the fact that they can’t hire me
I was, I had this arrogance when I did it,
which worked well for the part.
I had a little trouble with Sushi Girl, cos I read it
and I thought wow, this is awfully violent,
he even tortures someone with pliers to the teeth,
and I’ve been married to a dental hygienist
for over 30 years, so may the floss be with you,
with her. But, er, I thought, this is one of
those movies that I’d like to see,
I don’t know if I can handle being in it,
so foolishly, I turned it down, and my daughter said
you know you’re always complaining about why don’t I
get parts like Paul Giamatti, or why don’t I get parts
like Steve Buscemi, cos I love those character parts,
it doesn’t have to be the main role, just something
interesting, and supporting is fine with me,
she said if you turn this down, I don’t want to
ever hear you complain about not getting character parts
again, I thought, boy, is she right. I wonder
if it’s too late, and I called my agent, and said
contact them, and say that I want to meet with the director
and fortunately they hadn’t cast that part,
because as it turns out, I mean, I didn’t know
anybody in the cast, except for Tony Todd,
and he has such gravitas, he’s such a great actor,
and I was sort of his sidekick. So I thought,
well at least I know Tony, and, erm, but it turned out
to be, you know, one of the most fulfilling roles
I’ve ever played, and I didn’t epect that.
I once asked Lee Marvin for advice
I meant career advice but he thought for a moment,
and he said, er, “never stand when you can sit.”
and I still follow that advice. There’s a little
seat in the elevator, I sat down on the way up.
But, no, I usually take advice by observing
what other people do. You know?
People say did you give the young cast members advice,
you know, in the new Star Wars film?
I said absolutely not. They are amazing, and in fact,
if anyone should be getting advice, it’s me from them.
– The first Star Wars in the UK, from what I understand,
was like a mini mutiny. Everyone thought George Lucas
was an idiot, nobody wanted to be on the set, the actors
were incredibly critical, some of them, I’m just curious,
sort of, to the extent you observed it, kind of how
you saw George Lucas.
– [Mark] The attitude towards the film when we
were first making it?
– The first production, when the part that was in the UK?
Yeah, it was very badly, so how did he kind of lead
through that, how did you lead through that?
And what was your impression of him?
– Well what I have to tell you is that the crew that
was making it, they were all very professional
but they all thought it was, put kindly, “rubbish”.
They thought it was silly, I mean, there’s not a lot
of things they can compare it to, Doctor Who, maybe,
there’s a comic strip called Dan Dare, the idiom
was not really something that was familiar to the British
crew. So they were really nice, and they liked all of us,
but they just thought it was ridiculous, they thought
it would be a movie that would be released only in matinee
for children, in the daytime. And I loved the British sense
of humor, we had Kenny the boom guy, you know,
you’d be doing this dialog, you know, you know,
I want to go to Alderon with you, you know,
there are all these phrases that were unusual to their ears,
and it’d get picked up by the crew, and you’d be walking
along the hallway and you’d pass Kenny, he’d go,
“Alderon, we’re all going to Alderon, mate, all of us…”
(laughs)
And you know, he’d always be there, you’d do this
really difficult dialog and you’d look up at Kenny
holding the boom, and he’d always give you the eyeroll
like, “ugh”, (laughs), it was all, and believe me,
there was a typo one day on one of the, when they
were trying to type “Obe wan kenobe”, and they added
an ‘i’ where they shouldn’t, and it came out “obe wonky”
we didn’t know what that meant, but the crew never
let us forget it.
(crowd laughs)
(Kenny voice) “Obe Wonky, alright, you alright?”
But it, no. But they were very kind about it.
But I just thought, you know, you have to believe
in what you’re doing. I thought it was good.
– Famously you almost did all your stunts yourself
– Except for a few, so I noticed you shaped up since
Sushi Girl. Are you still into fencing stuff?
– Well first of all, Bob Anderson was the Olympic Champion
and he made me look good, because I, you choreograph it
down to each and every move. In those days, we’d
choreograph the scene, and then George looked at it,
and he said “You can’t take your hand off the lightsabre”
we said “why?” He said “because it’s heavy, it’s like
Excalibur,” which really limits the kind of movement
you can make. You know, flash forward a couple
of decades and we’re watching Phantom Menace,
and they’re twirling them around like batons.
He changed his mind. But we had to go back,
and re-do the whole thing. So Bob Anderson
I give full credit for making me look like I was a
competent sword fighter. The only stunts
I wasn’t allowed to do because of the insurance,
Colin Skeaping was my stunt double,
and he went out the window in Empire Strikes Back,
and I think he did some of the flips and some of the
training sequences on Dagabah. But I loved it at the time.
When they wanted me to get into shape for seven,
they got me a trainer, and I went to the gym
and lost, I don’t know, over, like 42 pounds or something
but, and you go on this diet which is basically,
if it tastes good, don’t eat it. There’s no sugar,
no dairy, no fun, it’s just, er, protein shakes,
and lots and lots of…I’ve eaten more vegetables
in the last four years than I have in my entire adult life
But you know it’s really distressing when you figure out
it’s just diet and exercise? Cos you want that magic thing
you see the ads on TV, don’t change your diet,
don’t exercise, just take this pill,
I’m writing down all the information, my wife’s saying
you’re not getting those pills, whatever they are,
and it’s true, if you work out, watch your diet,
swim, it all pretty much all falls away, so I’m
very grateful to get paid to get into shape.
– Do you still train for fencing?
– Hmmm. That’s a loaded question. Perhaps.
– Would you do a short dialog between Luke and the Joker?
(audience cheers)
Hate to put you on the spot or anything
– (Joker voice) Well, hmm. Have to warm up to be Joker.
Luke! It’s me! The clown prince of crime! And also…
Your father!
(Luke Skywalker voice) Noo! That’s not true!
That’s impossible!
(Joker) Get used to it, kiddo (laughs)
(crowd cheers)
– Thank you so much guys for watching
I made this video because DarkClaude 4 asked me to
If there’s someone you want to vote on for the next top 10
check the link in the description and go and have your say
Finally wanted to give a quick shoutout to Matthew Britt
Matthew, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book
“Your One Word”, taking that picture, posting it to
Instagram, I really appreciate the support,
and I’m so glad you enjoyed the read.
So thank you guys again for watching, I believe in you
I hope you continue to believe in yourself
And whatever your one word is. Much love.
I’ll see you soon.
(swooshing noise.)
”
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