Mark Hamill ”regrets” not spending more time with Billie Lourd when she was a child.
The 66-year-old actor considers Billie – who is the daughter of the late Carrie Fisher, who passed away at the age of 60 last December – to be his ”niece” despite not being related by blood, and has revealed he would have liked to have bonded more with her when she was younger.
Speaking about Billie – who starred alongside Mark and her mother in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ as Lieutenant Connix and will reprise her role in upcoming movie ‘The Last Jedi’ – Mark said: ”With Billie Lourd being in ‘The Force Awakens’, she’s more prominent in this film, and I kind of regret … I mean the first time I met Billie she was six or seven so I missed that whole [part of her life]. I feel badly that I wasn’t there for my ‘niece’. And you know, she’s wonderful in her own right.”
And Mark can’t help but notice the resemblance between Billie and her mother – who starred as Princess Leia alongside Mark’s Luke Skywalker in the popular sci-fi franchise – as well as her late grandmother Debbie Reynolds, who passed away one day after Carrie.
Speaking to E! News, Mark said: ”There’s so much of Carrie in her. And so much of Debbie Reynolds in her, which you know, that’s fire and ice right there. Back in the day I hung with Carrie in Debbie’s apartment in Manhattan when she was doing theatre, and I was also at her Malibu place, Carrie and I were inseparable after the movie for a period of time.
”But to see Debbie and Carrie together … Debbie was optimistic and bright and bouncy, and Carrie was shuffling around and down and dark. It was like ‘Who’s the mother in this situation?’
”So I thought of Billie as a real sort of anchor in Carrie’s life.”
