47 years after the release of the first Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, has explained why George Lucas changed the character's name into the iconic version that it is today. It's a well-known fact that Luke's name in the original Star Wars (later retitled A New Hope) scripts was actually "Luke Starkiller", a much more aggressive version of the heroic surname that has come to define the Star Wars episodic saga. Over the years, the reasoning for this change has been explained in places, but Hamill himself has now provided his own explanation.

Hamill reveals on the Politickin' podcast how he was made aware of his character's name change, as well as the circumstances surrounding it. He says that the scene where Luke introduces himself to Princess Leia inside her cell had already been shot with Luke's Starkiller surname, and that Hamill was confused to see the same...