NEED TO KNOW
Mark Hamill’s cameo in Sleepwalkers simply slipped his mind.
The actor, 73, looked back at the 1992 Stephen King film during a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. Hamill makes a cameo in the horror film about shapeshifting vampires as Sheriff Jenkins.
The film stands out as the first that King wrote for the big screen directly, rather than first as a novel. Still, Hamill admitted he “totally forgot” that he was in it.
“If I remember right, Mick Garris, the director, asked me, ‘Could I do a small role?’ I loved him so much, and I thought, ‘I’ve gotta do it to help him,’ ” he shared.
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“I don’t even know if I got paid, but I totally forgot about it,” Hamill continued.
“If there’s not a premiere of a movie, sometimes they’ll slip through, and I don’t see ’em. I think I eventually saw it, but it was so long ago, I can’t remember much of it.”
While Jamill doesn’t remember the film’s plot or much about his character, he says he’s always been a fan of the horror author.
“I’ve always been a Stephen King fan, and if it came out after The Shining, because that’s one of the first things I ever saw. I remember I saw it in Westwood, [Calif.,] the very first week it opened. I walked directly from the theater to a bookstore and went home to read, ‘What the hell did I just see?’ ”
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In their most recent collaboration, The Long Walk, Hamill plays a fearsome character known as The Major. The Francis Lawrence-directed film, adapted by JT Mollner from King’s 1979 novel, is in theaters Sept. 12.
In a previous conversation with PEOPLE, Hamill teased his role in The Long Walk, comparing The Major to another famous villain of his: the Joker from Batman: The Animated Series.
“Villainy is fun to play because they don’t think of themselves as villains, they’re just doing their job,” he said at the time. “Anytime you can come in and just create chaos, it’s almost as satisfying to be hated by the audience as it is to be loved.”
