Mark Hamill is one of the most popular actors of this generation as he portrayed the role of Luke Skywalker in the evergreen franchise Star Wars. However, following his massive success and popularity in the first three Star Wars films, he opted to do voice work, which led to his other significant works like Castle In The Sky, A Fuller Life, and Batman Beyond: Return of The Joker. But his most renowned work was in the three seasons of Avatar: The Last Airbender, where he voiced Fire Lord Ozai.
Mark Hamill has flawlessly voiced the character, which was one of the key reasons for the show to be a massive hit. However, he had his fair share of doubts when voicing the character, as he believed that the show was already doomed from the beginning, that too for an interesting reason.
Mark Hamill Shares The Reason Why He Thought Avatar: The Last Airbender Was Doomed
Of all the characters featured in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Fire Lord Ozai was the most enigmatic and the scariest of them all, as for a majority of the show, his face remained a mystery. As a result, fans believed that the character was the perfect foe to be faced by the great Avatar.
The character was brought to life by Mark Hamill, though the character was not featured in too many episodes, and comparatively fewer dialogues compared to the other characters. But, he breathed fire into the character, making him great. While answering the internet’s most-wanted questions on WIRED, Mark Hamill shared his initial thoughts on the show and how he felt the show would have failed.
“I remember reading the first script thinking, ‘This thing’s gonna get canceled in four episodes because it’s too smart.’ And instead, it ran many, many seasons.”
However, he was taken aback by the positive reviews from the viewers of the show, who praised him as well as the series because it was immensely entertaining to watch with their children.
“It was really gratifying to hear that parents liked to watch it with their children. Because it talked up to children rather than talking down to them. It was a very, very smart show.”
It is extremely relieving to see that Mark Hamill had a wrong intuition about the longevity of Avatar: The Last Airbender, as the show is still going strong in 2024 and has gained a major fan following with a live adaptation of the TV Series by Netflix.
Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Showrunner Explains Why They Had to Skip Some Episodes From The Anime
During an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Albert Kim, the showrunner of the Netflix adaptation addressed how he wanted to include all the episodes from the anime, but bigger problems like limited episodes and world expansion within a limited budget would consume the time and money. He said,
“I wish we could have done all of them, but there’s the reality of creating eight-hour-long episodes for a serialized drama and also expanding the world in places and telling new parts of the story that hadn’t been told before. That takes up time.”
“I think people think it’s as easy as saying, “Well there are 20 half-hour episodes of the original. That’s 10 hours. And there are eight one-hour episodes of the new show, so they only needed to make two more episodes.” But it’s not exactly one-to-one there, so that was the process we went through.”
Nevertheless, the Netflix adaptation is already a massive hit among the fans of the anime series and only time will tell if the show will match the popularity of the anime.
Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) can be streamed on Netflix.
