Watch: 'Kingsman' star Mark Hamill discusses that time he died in a comic book

Mark Hamill has a twofold connection to the action-packed spy flick Kingsman: The Secret Service, (now available for digital download, on Blu-ray/DVD June 9). The Star Wars icon has a supporting role as a college professor who gets embroiled in the nefarious global plot of bad guy Valentine (Samuel L. Jackson) — one that has to be stopped by secret agents Harry Hart (Colin Firth) and Eggsy Unwin (Taron Egerton). But Hamill also is in the comic-book source material.

The 2012 series The Secret Service revolved around celebrities getting kidnapped — machinations that are a little tweaked in the movie adaptation — and writer Mark Millar and artist Dave Gibbons included Hamill himself in the comic's opening scene, tied up and in a bad way.



In this exclusive clip from the Kingsman bonus features (WARNING: Video contains some saucy NSFW language in a couple comic panels), Millar explains that he waited until the last minute to see if it was OK with the actor that he appeared:
"It literally went right up to the night before the comic was going to the printers. I just rememberd I didn’t have his permission and I didn’t know Mark Hamill. But luckily he was a friend of a friend and I managed to get his phone number."
A big comic nerd, Hamill was already a big fan of Millar and Gibbons — the Kick-Ass scribe of Marvel's Civil War series and the artist of Watchmen, respectively. But still, Hamill admittedly was curious about how he was going to be portrayed on the page:
"(Millar) said, 'Basically you’ve been kidnapped as a celebrity and you’re rescued by the Secret Service and there’s this mad pre-title sequence that emulates the Bond films where you’re spirited away on a toboggan and there’s this dash down a mountainside in the alps. There's a spectacular sequence and then you go sailing out over a cliff and plummet to your death.' Well, that’s unexpected."
Hamill was Kool and the Gang with it, though, and nobody was more relieved than Gibbons:
"I was genuinely like a dog with two tails when I got an email from Luke Skywalker to say, 'Yep, I really like what you've drawn, Dave.' That was great, We’re all swimming in the same fan soup."