Star Wars: The Force Awakens 'tricked' everyone with Mark Hamill's inclusion in table read photo

"It wouldn’t have been right not to have him there, but it also wouldn’t have been right to have him there and not participate"

J.J. Abrams tricked us all; and he tricked us all so very well.

The internet burst ablaze with excitement when the very first cast photo of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was dropped, a black-and-white shot of the first table reading; intermixing the franchise's stalwarts with its christened newcomers.

"It was a momentous thing for the new actors," Abrams recalled to Entertainment Weekly. "We were not just coming together but we were going to be reading alongside the existing cast. It was… you could feel it in the air, the moment. It was exciting because we felt like it made it real in a weird way."

Yet, included amongst those stalwarts was Mark Hamill; which seemed perfectly normal at the time, but now suggests the actor might have been quite bored over the course of that table read. Knowing that Hamill's Luke only appears in The Force Awakens for its final scene, without uttering a single line, Abrams was keen to put fans off the scent.

"It was partly trickery," Abrams said. "We knew, obviously, that he didn’t speak in the film. And because we knew we were going to take pictures, and people knew he was in the movie, we needed to have him there."

Furthermore, it simply seemed important the actor was present for such an iconic moment in the film's history; "It wouldn’t have been right not to have him there, but it also wouldn’t have been right to have him there and not participate." So Hamill was kept busy during the rehearsal by reading the stage directions; which actually turned out to be quite the request.

"It is a pretty herculean task, to ask an actor to read a hundred and twenty some pages aloud over the course of two plus hours," Abrams added. "I almost felt guilty. And yet it also felt so right and I hoped that he would say yes. He immediately said, ‘Of course.’ It was a way of having [him] be part of every scene, every moment, not just spiritually or thematically or narratively, but actually. Having his voice in it made the read through a better experience for everyone."

Footage of the table reading is featured on the Blu-ray bonus feature The Story Awakens; part of Star Wars: The Force Awakens' home entertainment release on 18 April.