Mark Hamill unleashes a fiendish cackle that simultaneously sounds like skin ripped from flesh and fingernails dragged across corrugated iron. If the bowels of hell have a soundtrack, this is it.
But the actor's descent into madness is only momentary and for anyone familiar with Batman: Arkham Asylum, it is all too familiar. In rehearsing his role as Joker, Hamill would laugh to himself in his car: a practice, he jokes, that wasn't so unusual in Los Angeles.
"I have this absolute abandon when it came to Joker's laugh," he says. "It's like a musical instrument. He laughs at really inappropriate times and finds things funny that sane people do not. I wanted to make that a large part of my arsenal in terms of approaching the character. There are so many people that I pay homage to: a little Dwight Schultz [the A-Team's 'Howling Mad' Murdock] here, Dracula's Renfield there."
For anyone who thought his career died with the first Star Wars trilogy, Hamill is having the last laugh. After portraying Luke Skywalker, the actor seemed to drop out of sight from the movie world. But he's been under our noses all along in PC games: Arkham Asylum, and a few classics like Wing Commander III and Tim Schafer's Full Throttle. He was a mentor in Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, a narrator in Call of Duty 2, and played the hairy hero in X-Men: Wolverine's Revenge.
While established actors usually dabble in games for contractual movie tie-ins, Hamill has embraced the genre wholeheartedly. Star Wars launched the career of Harrison Ford, but it sent Hamill (and his co-star Carrie Fisher) free-falling toward typecast hell. As his father was a captain in the US Navy, though, he spent much of his childhood on the move. After Luke was left with the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, he did what he'd always done: move on.
It was this need to break convention that led him, in 1993, to a new medium: the videogame talkie. In Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, he was one of the first established actors to voice a game character. Some saw it as a step back, but he could hardly have cared less. "I'm sure there's a range of opinions, from 'You're slumming it', or 'Can't you get more legitimate work?' But that snobbishness comes with the business."
By the time of PC gaming's full motion video (FMV) craze in the mid-'90s actors were eating their words. The titles may have been camper than a row of tents, but they were not short on talent, as Hamill discovered when he played Colonel Christopher Blair in three Wing Commander games.
"There were great actors in that: Malcolm McDowell [A Clockwork Orange], John Rhys-Davies [Lord of the Rings], and John Spencer [The West Wing]. Malcolm is one of the most hysterically funny actors I've ever worked with. He's just brutal in his humour and merciless in terms of torturing you on camera. He would be making smoochy faces and I'd tell him, 'You know, I never look you in the eyes, I'm looking you in the chin, you S.O.B.'"
As he developed a parallel career in animation voiceover - becoming a cult star by playing Joker in Batman: The Animated Series - he went on to play characters in games like Starsiege, relishing the challenges of interactive entertainment. In films, actors rarely explore every nuance of a character. In games, characters change depending on the player's decisions. Some games, such as Full Throttle, even gave him a chance to play numerous roles. This was the only time Hamill acted on a LucasArts title.
Considering the amount of Star Wars games released, has he intentionally resisted portraying Skywalker in a game? "When I played Luke from 1977 to 1983, games were in their infancy," he says. "I talked about turning a page and starting a new chapter. Those movies had a beginning, middle and end, and everyone sort of moved on.
"I don't really know how to answer that, because I've never been asked to do it. That's fine, though. If you're playing Luke the way he was in the films - from his late teens to mid-'20s - I've outgrown the role. In the story, Luke is so boy-next-door farm boy, it's like Dorothy in Oz. All the other characters that surround him are fantastic."
He pauses for thought. "I'm not sure when George's animated series Clone Wars is set, but I think it's before Luke was born. Maybe when he was an infant." Perhaps, then, he could provide infant sounds? "Yeah, whimpering myself to sleep at night."
With Luke put to rest, Hamill became known for portraying another icon, albeit one that'd have the Star Wars hero quivering in his toga. Throughout the '90s, he played Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, reviving the role in various spin-offs, and for the 2001 game Batman: Vengeance.
"I played Joker from 1992 to 2004 in all the animated versions, including the feature films," he says. "I stopped in 2004 and didn't expect to return to him, so when they asked me to come back I was curious." The return of the Animated Series' Kevin Conroy as Batman and Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn, alongside the writing talents of Lost's Paul Dini to Arkham Asylum convinced him to sign up.
"I thought this will be one last chance to play Joker. And it was so much fun to play a character who is clearly insane." So what does Hamill think drives Batman's foe? "I'm an old school comic book fan and I thought Heath Ledger was brilliant in The Dark Knight: a harrowing interpretation with a complete lack of joy. But I think Joker has a huge ego, and he's almost angry that Batman is obstructing his ascent. He believes he deserves acclaim for his genius."
In Hollywood, Hamill must meet people like that all the time. "Absolutely, but all these things are exaggerations of real life." Having acted in film, TV, theatre and animation, Hamill is not giving up on games. His next project, Black Pearl, is based on a run of comics he wrote in the '90s, and there's an animated movie in the works. The actor could have retired to bask in Star Wars glory years ago, but his love of the job keeps him going.
He laughs again, only this time not in the manner of a terrifying lunatic. "The minute I get jaded is the minute I don't get out of my pyjamas."
Mark Hamill comes across to me as a down to earth guy who knows who he is, where he is going (and that the destination can change in a heartbeat as life has a way of doing). He strikes me as the type of guy I think could be quite cool to kick back and drink a beer or two with.
Top chap...and a screen legend for his Skywalker role.
He is definately having the last laugh because gaming is now at the fore I would say of most entertainment, I hope he is more and more sought after for characters in games, good on you!
Hamill comes across as a very affable chap. I knew a Mark Hamill once, though I didn't make the link until we finished school. He always said that he liked the fact that I never derided him for his namesake. A missed opportunity methinks.
1. Call of Duty 2 (2005) "I was mostly in the studio by myself, doing whatever was required. But it's all artifice really - like looping dialogue. A huge percentage of the Star Wars movies are looped, meaning ADR - additional dialogue recording. It's not the original voice track: it'sus in studios, replacing our voices. If there's anything that needs a specific noise it's looped. The sound people will tell you - they won Oscars on all three films."
2. X-Men: Wolverine's Revenge (2002) "The thing about voiceover that is so appealing to me is it's liberating not to be seen. The anonymity is part of the magic. Ifeel like a magician's assistant in the sense that if you play your part right, it comes out really well. In voiceover you can play a much broader range of characters, because they're not concerned with how you look, just how you sound."
3. Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) "Joker is endearing because he's so committed to what he considers his own genius. There's a real symbiotic relationship with Batman. I don't know if there are two fictional characters more perfectly suited to one another. Maybe Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty. He takes such glee in what he does. It's absurd on its face - you can't bring too much real-life logic to it, but within the comic book world, he towers above so many other run-of-the mill villains."
4. Full Throttle (1995) "I remember playing a full, three-piece suited character, almost someone out of a Tennessee Williams play. I came at that game with a repertory theatre frame of mind, where you play a butler one night, the leading man the next, then a sidekick the third night. Maybe the fourth night, you're not even on stage: you're running the booth. A jack of all trades, master of none. I grew up that way."
5. Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (2002) "I love character parts because they are so far removed from yourself. When I played Amadeus or Joseph Merrick (aka 'The Elephant Man') on Broadway, I look in the mirror and feel Mark has receded and the character is there. I lean on the side of villainy for voiceover because they push the buttons of the audience and illicit emotions that make for a colourful story."
8. Wing Commander (1994-1997) "We had cheat sheets of every kind. If youlook at the game, when we're looking down at the game's interface with light on our faces, that's from a teleprompter because of the massive amount of dialogue. One of the greatest things about doing animation or videogames is you don't have to memorise your lines. You get as old as I am, it's hard."
7. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (1993) "This is where Mark gets to be Steve Buscemi: a character sidekick to Tim Curry. Curry is a masterful actor. I saw him on stage when he did Rocky Horror at the Roxy Theatre on Sunset Boulevard. When I was listening to Tim's tracks, in my imagination I had a perfectly lit set, even though I was in a recording studio. To me that's what is so thrilling about voice-acting for games."
6. Black Pearl (TBC) "The challenge here is to make [the spin-off of Hamill's comic book] as gritty and realistic as real life. If you accidentally kill someone, you'll be pursued by the forces of justice. You get wounded and tired, and so you'll be rewarded for non-confrontation. It'sthe opposite of a shooter. The game isn't an easy sell, because it's different. It's more of a stealth game. We're trying to attempt an alternate adventure and action game."
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