Mark Hamill Confirms Dark ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Lightsaber Theory

Everyone loves to gobble up “Star Wars” secrets when they leak (OK, everyone except for maybe J.J. Abrams), but those juicy tidbits might come at a cost.

In an interview with U.K. newspaper The Sun, Mark Hamill says an alternate opening to “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” that leaked last year was legitimate, part of the original script he first read.

One day I read the first 15 minutes of the film absolutely accurately. I can tell you now that in the original opening shot of [episode] seven, the first thing that came into frame was a hand with a lightsaber, a severed hand that enters the atmosphere, and then the hand and bone burns away and goes sticking into the surface of Jakku. And this alien hand comes in — don’t know if it was Maz — but it was an alien hand who takes the light saber way, and then the movie proceeds as you see it.

He also said that after director Abrams invited him back to reprise his role as Luke Skywalker, he read the script for the first time on an iPad under constant security guard so he couldn’t take notes.

Hamill said he was taken aback when he later saw that someone online leaked that opening correctly online. After the leak, filmmakers ultimately decided to open the movie right into an introduction to new character Poe Dameron on the planet Jakku, after its classic crawl setting the stage.

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Abrams is famously tight about security with his productions, though he also shows a sense of humor about how avidly fans devour clues about the rebooted franchise. When a smattering of set photos leaked in 2014 as he was filming “The Force Awakens,” Abrams tweeted his own set photo with a handwritten note that read “I wish people would stop leaking photos from Episode VII, and making ridiculous claims that the Millennium Falcon is in the movie.” He propped that note up against what looked like the hologram chess board that Chewie and R2D2 play aboard that ship in “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

“The Force Awakens” is the top-grossing film in U.S. history with more than $900 million at the domestic box office, beating the $760 million that former record-holder “Avatar.” The more than $2 billion worldwide haul, however, still falls behind Jim Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi epic and “Titanic.”