"No one forgot about him!" Star Wars: The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams confirmed in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly when asked what's going on with the lack of Luke Skywalker. "We were hoping people would care, but there are a lot of things that are not on the poster, as busy as the poster is. Certainly Luke is a very important aspect of the story." That's a relief, but exactly what kind of role is he going to play in the movie? Will Luke still be a hero or could he have turned to the Dark Side? Abrams obviously wasn't willing to spill the beans, but did have this to say. "It was the thing that struck me the hardest, which was the idea that doing a story that took place nearly 40 years after Jedi meant that there would be a generation for whom Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Leia would be as good as myth. They’d be as old and as mythic as the tale of King Arthur. They would be characters who they may have heard of, but maybe not. They’d be characters who they might believe existed, or just sounded like a fairy tale."
40 years may not seem like a very long time, but in an entire galaxy? That might as well be a lifetime, though with Princess Leia now a General, surely she, Han, and Luke didn't just fade into obscurity? Regardless of what the Jedi Knight has been up to for all those years, it sounds like Hamill is ok with leaving those years unexplored. "That’s the beauty of the story, is it leaves it up to the audience’s imagination," he says. "It was the story of a boy going from a farm boy to a Jedi Master, and I always thought it was amusing, and if you put it in terms of James Bond, it would be like telling the story of how he got his license to kill, and then stopping and never telling any stories of what his adventures were. But that was just the structure of the movie, so it leaves it to the audience." What do you guys think? Let us know your thoughts in the usual place.