Mark Hamill goes viral after fan tells him to tweet his own name

Actor responded to a fan suggestion that he could go viral with virtually zero effort

Mark Hamill has gone viral after a fan suggested he could achieve the feat simply by tweeting his own name.

The Star Wars actor was responding to the idea from Twitter user Lauren / @LozzaBean12, who told him: “You could just tweet ‘Mark Hamill’ and you’d get thousands of likes.”

A few hours later, Hamill did just that.

At the time of writing, his “Mark Hamill” tweet, which is currently pinned to his profile, had received close to half a million likes and 28,000 retweets.

This is Us star Ken Olin also wanted to join the fun, asking: “Will that work for anyone? Here goes: Mark Hamill.”

His tweet received 23,000 likes.

Lauren later tweeted an Anchorman gif that quoted the famous line, “boy, that escalated quickly”, in reference to the success of Hamill’s post.

The actor’s name has been trending on Twitter since yesterday (5 September).

Hamill is hugely popular among fans, in part thanks to his habit of regularly engaging with them on social media.

In March this year, he replied to the Bad Lip Reading Twitter account after it poorly dubbed a “deleted scene” from The Force Awakens.

Hamill encouraged fans to listen “as @BadLipReading gives me, not only a chance to dub Harrison [Ford], but more lines than I had in the actual film”.

He added the sarcastic hashtag: #EpVII_MyOnlySilentMovie.