The force that binds the galaxy together has a name, and for Mark Hamill, it was Carrie Fisher. At 74 years old, the actor who defined a generation as Luke Skywalker is no longer holding back the raw, unfiltered truth about the woman he called his space twin. In a series of emotional tributes and candid interviews, Hamill has peeled back the layers of Hollywood glamour to reveal the chaotic, brilliant, and irreplaceable soul of Carrie Fisher, and the devastating void her loss left in his life.

The moment that crystallized this truth came at Star Wars Celebration, where Hamill took the stage not to promote a film, but to lay bare his grief before thousands of fans. The room fell silent as he spoke, not of Princess Leia, but of Carrie, the 19-year-old force of nature he met in 1975. He described their first meeting with the precision of a man who has replayed it a thousand times.

It was a chemistry read, but it was also the beginning of a bond that would outlast marriages, careers, and even death itself.

Hamill was 24, hungry for a break, and utterly unprepared for the person sitting across from him. Carrie Fisher was the daughter of Hollywood royalty, Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and she carried the scars of a public childhood that would have crushed a lesser spirit. She was sardonic, dark, and disarmingly witty, a combination that left Hamill bowled over.

He has admitted that he thought the script for Star Wars was a comedy, and that he believed he was playing a sidekick to Harrison Ford. But the one thing he never misread was Carrie.

Their relationship, as Hamill tells it, was never simple. There was a moment, he confessed with the sheepishness of a man who knows exactly how it sounds, when things got complicated. On the pretext of discussing kissing techniques for the film, they found themselves making out like a couple of horny teenagers.

But the passion died as quickly as it sparked, killed by the very thing that defined their friendship: laughter. We both started laughing, he recalled. Believe me, it kills your passion if someone’s laughing in your face.

But I thought we dodged a bullet there, because we had the fun without any of the responsibility.

That laugh was the cornerstone of their relationship. Hamill has said that making Carrie Fisher laugh was a badge of honor, a prize worth winning because she was so hard to crack. She had seen too much of the world to be easily surprised, and her humor was a shield as much as a weapon.

But when he got her, really got her, it was like winning something worth winning. This dynamic carried them through the grueling production of the original trilogy, through the sudden, disorienting explosion of fame, and through the decades that followed.

When Star Wars was released in 1977, it changed everything overnight. Hamill was 25 and one of the most famous people on Earth before he had processed what had happened. He has spoken openly about the disorientation of that level of fame, the way it reorganizes your relationship to ordinary life.

Carrie, however, navigated it differently. She reveled in it, Hamill told Variety. She was true Hollywood royalty and she knew it.

While he struggled to escape the shadow of Luke Skywalker, taking theater roles and auditioning for parts that would prove his range, Carrie had no patience for his self-doubt.

He recalled a specific moment when she attended a Broadway production he was in. The playbill biography mentioned his theater credits and concluded with the phrase, He is also known for a series of popular space movies. She found him afterward and asked, with her signature directness, What’s the deal?

How come you didn’t mention Star Wars? When he explained he wanted to be taken seriously, she looked at him steadily and said, Hey, get over yourself. Hamill has credited that conversation with reorienting his entire career, with putting his relationship to the franchise into a perspective he could actually live with.

She sorted him out, he has said, when he had lost it.

But while Hamill was finding his footing, Carrie was fighting battles he could only partially understand from the sidelines. Her struggles with addiction, with prescription drugs, with alcohol, and with the bipolar disorder that she would later write about with stunning frankness, were documented in memoirs that startled even those who thought they knew her. She wrote about her parents’ scandalous divorce, her brief engagement to Dan Aykroyd, her marriage to Paul Simon, and her time in psychiatric care, not to expose herself, but because she believed honesty was a form of service.

She wanted other people living with the same battles to know they were not alone.

Hamill watched this with reverence. He has described her advocacy for mental health awareness as one of the most significant things she ever did, ranking it alongside her performances and her books. She made you feel when you were in her presence like you were her best friend, he said at the tribute.

She was so laser-focused on you, so engaging that it was exhilarating to be around her. The thing she had about her that no one else could match was she made you feel like you were her best friend. And then, part of me did fall in love with her.

I think every guy that she met, Dan Aykroyd has told me stories, Paul Simon has told me stories. She had you under her spell.

The years between the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy were marked by distance. Hamill moved to theater, voice acting, and a stable family life with his wife, Mary Lou York, whom he married in 1978. That marriage, which has lasted nearly half a century and produced three children, kept him grounded in ways that fame never could.

When Disney announced in 2012 that a new trilogy was coming, Hamill’s immediate reaction was complicated. He was not sure he wanted to go back. He was not sure he had more to say about Luke Skywalker.

But what made him say yes, in the end, was partly Carrie.

She was excited about The Force Awakens in a way that was completely unguarded and completely infectious. Her enthusiasm reminded him of what the whole thing had meant. When they were on set together again after 30 years, it felt, he has said, like no time had passed.

They were Luke and Leia, but they were also Mark and Carrie, still finishing each other’s sentences. That joy, however, was shattered on December 23rd, 2016, when Carrie Fisher suffered a cardiac arrest aboard a flight from London to Los Angeles.

Hamill was in the middle of filming The Last Jedi. He posted on Twitter immediately, as if 2016 couldn’t get any worse. Night.

Sending all our love to Carrie Fisher. He held on to hope for four days, posting updates, invoking the force, doing the thing that people do when they cannot accept that the worst is really happening. On December 27th, 2016, Carrie Fisher died.

She was 60 years old. His wife came into the bedroom with tears rolling down her face. He has started to tell that story in public more than once and been unable to finish it.

He told the Star Wars Celebration audience four months later, I have been trying to deal with this. You know, there are the five stages of grief, and just when I think I’ve gotten to acceptance, I bounce back to anger because I’m mad. She should be here.

In 2024, at a fan convention in Chicago, he became emotional describing the moment his wife delivered the news, trailing off mid-sentence, unable to complete it. He told the crowd, It forever altered how I reacted to Star Wars in general. The heart was gone.

I don’t talk about it because I don’t like reliving it.

The Last Jedi, which was dedicated to her memory, required him to process his own grief publicly and on camera simultaneously. He had to complete a film that contained her final performance as Leia while carrying the knowledge that she was gone. He has said that watching her in the finished film is still, every time, an ambush.

He knows it’s coming and it still catches him. She had once told him what she wanted him to do at her funeral. If you go first, I’ll heckle your funeral, she said.

She asked him to do the same for her. He didn’t.

He stood on a stage in Orlando in April 2017 and told stories and read from a statement and choked up in front of thousands of people who loved her. He didn’t heckle. He honored her.

Because that is what you do when the person who is supposed to be immortal is suddenly, permanently gone. He did, however, hold on to one image of her. He shared it at the end of the tribute to close the hour.

When I think of her, he said, she’s looking down from the celestial stratosphere with those big brown eyes, that sly smile on her face as she lovingly extends me the middle finger. And that’s how I want you to think of her. That was Carrie.

At 74, Mark Hamill continues to honor her in the ways available to him. When she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in May 2023, he was there reading from the statement he had written in 2016 that she was our princess, dammit, and adding in his own voice, but everything would have been so much draber and less interesting if she hadn’t been the friend that she was. I’ll never stop missing her, but I’m so thankful we had her as long as we did.

I’m grateful for the laughter, the wisdom, the kindness, and even the bratty, self-indulgent crap my beloved space twin drove me crazy with through the years. So, thank you, Carrie. I love you.

That is the truth Mark Hamill tells about Carrie Fisher. Not a polished tribute for a stage and an audience, though he has given those, too. But the unpolished version, the one where he can’t finish the sentence about his wife coming into the bedroom, the one where he bounces between acceptance and anger because she should be here, the one where he closes his eyes and sees her in the celestial stratosphere, those big brown eyes, that sly smile, the middle finger extended with enormous affection.

That was Carrie. And for Mark Hamill, the force will never be quite as strong without her.