One of Mark Hamill’s best character-actor performances is streaming now for free

For the second time this year, the erstwhile Luke Skywalker has contributed a character actor turn to a Stephen King adaptation. In The Long Walk, Mark Hamill equips himself with dark shades and cruelly ironic pep talks to play The Major, an architect of an unspecified fascist regime in the film’s fictional (for now) dystopia. He supervises an annual contest where young men are selected to compete in a long-distance walk. Failure to keep pace results in death, and the last man standing wins a lavish prize. The Major rides alongside them, occasionally offering macho quasi-encouragement, decidedly different from the pragmatic advice he gives out as Albie, alcoholic grandfather to the main character in The Life of Chuck. These two otherwise disparate men share one major commonality: Hamill giving a mercilessly hammy performance in both films. However, neither use Hamill as well as a more obscure movie that combines fatherly advice and twisted villainy: the little-seen dramedy Brigsby Bear.

Brigsby Bear came out during the best year for Hamill’s live-action career since the original Star Wars trilogy: 2017, when he also had a co-starring role in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Despite Hamill’s own initial misgivings about the characterization of an older Luke Skywalker in that film, he gives one of his best performances as a disillusioned Luke who nonetheless provides a short mentorship to Force-sensitive Rey (Daisy Ridley). Some fans were uncomfortable that their hero showed dimensionality in the film, preferring to think of him as steadfast and unchanging as an action figure. But the older Luke fits with the character-actor career Hamill has cultivated throughout middle age. And earlier that same year, he made a strong addition to that line-up with Brigsby Bear opposite Saturday Night Live alumnus Kyle Mooney.

At first, it seems like Hamill is playing Mooney’s father but as the story develops, it becomes clear that something is amiss. Twentysomething James (Mooney) never leaves his bunker home in the desert, and is treated like a child by his parents Ted (Hamill) and April (Jane Adams), who give him video tapes of his sole pop-culture obsession: an educational fantasy series called Brigsby Bear Adventures, featuring a live-action costumed bear who looks a bit like a refugee from Pizzatime Theater. When the police arrive on the scene, James must confront the fact that Ted and April abducted him from another family when he was an infant, and have been holding him captive for a quarter-century without his knowledge. On top of that, Brigsby Bear Adventures isn’t a real show. It’s a project created by Ted, a former toy designer, used to occupy and instruct his ill-gotten “son.”

Hamill is only fully on-camera for a few scenes of Brigsby Bear, at the beginning and the end, subtly suggesting the monstrous illness that could cause someone to commit such a ghastly act while still creating a facade of low-key affability that leaves James feeling oddly conflicted. But his presence lingers over the entire film, both thematically because of Ted’s deeds, and practically because Hamill’s voice appears in just about every clip of the Brigsby Bear show. In addition to voicing Brigsby, Ted (which is to say Hamill) also plays the show’s villain, whose distorted face appears like the weird sun in Teletubbies.

This makes Brigsby Bear one of the few live-action movies to truly take advantage of Hamill’s biggest post-Star Wars job as an in-demand voice actor — most notably as the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series and various other Bat-projects. In a sense, he’s doing voices for these Stephen King adaptations, too, guttural and alcohol-weathered for Life of Chuck and preeningly evil authoritarian barking for The Long Walk. Both movies take advantage of the craggier qualities that have crept into his voice over the years, but Brigsby Bear really shows off his range. Just as he plays both heroic Brigsby and his cackling nemesis on the show-within-a-show, he’s a lingering father figure to James as well as the designer of his pain and dysfunction.

Mooney, who also co-wrote the film, and director Dave McCrary improbably weave that pain into a gentle, sweet-natured fish-out-of-water comedy, as James navigates a broader world he’s never had the chance to explore. Just attending a party or having dinner with his old/new family presents endless social challenges. He reacts by deciding to finish Brigsby Bear’s adventures himself, because the show stopped production once Ted and April were apprehended. He begins production on a Brigsby Bear film with some leftover props and the expertise of Spence (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), a friend of James’s younger sister Aubrey (Ryan Simpkins), who starts to bond with her brother over the project.

Fans of Mooney’s more overtly comedic work, which has covered similarly retro kids’ programming with shows like Saturday Morning All Star Hits! on Netflix, may be taken aback by the earnestness of this project. Even Mooney’s recent directorial debut Y2K had broader laughs and more fantastical situations buttressing its grounded characters. Brigsby Bear isn’t especially satirical, instead using an almost impossibly specific fake fandom to explore therapeutic qualities of creativity. King’s work in general, and Life of Chuck in particular, takes a similarly thoughtful pleasure in looking at popular (or obscure) culture, nostalgia, and youthful traumas, but for whatever reason, Hamill hasn’t been a great fit with the author’s work, or maybe he jumps in with distracting enthusiasm. He hits it too hard, relishing the caricatures too much, like a voiceover artist still cranking it to 11 for the recording booth.

On the other hand, it’s the actors who keep Brigsby Bear from becoming too wispy to stand on its own: Mooney with his comic timing redirected toward greater pathos (although there was always some of that in his best SNL characters, too), clutch supporting work from Greg Kinnear (as a cop with a secret love of acting), and Hamill’s small yet multifunctional role. In the King movies, Hamill feels like a cutesy mascot. In Brigsby Bear, voicing a mascot-like character, he does some of his most cleverly textured work.

Brigsby Bear is currently streaming for free on The Roku Channel.