trivia


  • Mark is a huge fan of comic books.
  • He collects comic books, model kits and cereal boxes ("I'm a cereal fanatic, but I'm not going to pay $700 for a Snagglepuss Cocoa Krispies box").
  • From early on in Mark's career, he has given time and talent to work with various charitable organisations. Many of them are directly related to children or issues concerning them.
  • Mark worked for free on "Britannia Hospital" (1982).
  • He admires the works of Stan Laurel, Alfred Hitchcock and Ray Harryhausen.
  • Though in the "Star Wars" trilogy he shoots a pistol and swings a light saber right-handed, he eats and writes left-handed.
  • He did all his own stunts in "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), except in the scene in Cloud city where he is sucked out of a window.
  • He also did all his own stunts in "Return of the Jedi" (1983), except two places: where "Luke Skywalker" jumps off the plank into the Sarlaac, turns, and flips back onto the plank and on the Death Star when Vader throws his saber at the supports of the catwalk.
  • For months, Mark was literally the only human actor on call for the scenes on Dagobah in "The Empire Strikes Back". He had to act with a puppet, a robot, and an assortment of lizards and snakes (one of which bit him).
  • He kept his Luke Skywalker boots, from the first "Star Wars" movie. When the movie was re-released to theaters in the late 1990s, his son asked if he could wear the boots to a showing. Mark said no, telling him he didn't think the boy would "get out alive" if fans knew his boots were the originals.
  • He also kept the Stormtrooper helmet he wore in the first "Star Wars" movie.

quotes


  • "You know how there are some stars out there who know how to market themselves? I don't have that."
  • "I never saw myself so much as an actor. I wanted to be a cartoonist like Charles M. Schulz and create my own world and be able to have a studio at home and not commute and be able to be with my family. I just didn't have the skills to pull that off and so I've gravitated toward theater because I like all of it."
  • "You know where [the pride] comes from? It's not so much from the industry ... but the 9-year-old kid who looks at you like a cross between Superman and Santa Claus. And you'd have to be a really, really hardened cynic not to be moved by that. Not only that, but just doing the interviews for this animation series, I can't tell you how many people have said, 'I got into the business because of that movie.' ... I totally understand that because I remember walking out of 'Jason and the Argonauts' (1963) and saying, 'I don't know how they got those skeletons to fight, but someday I want that to be my job. To make skeletons fight.'"
  • "I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George (Lucas) would do it."
  • "If I were to talk to George Lucas - and I will - I'd say to him, 'One of the greatest advantages that the earlier pictures had, which the new picture [The Phantom Menace] did not have, was a voice of skepticism. We had someone in there going, "The Force, are you kidding me? I'm just here for the money." ... Everybody's so serious. I mean, sheesh! Lighten up!"
  • "You don't want to be some pathetic old guy shuffling around in his slippers going, 'Yeah, I used to have The Force. The Force was with me, dang it!'" [on watching the prequels]