Our good pal (and occasional Fantha Tracks contributor) Darren Hayes chats with Starwars.com about his own journey, from a Star Wars loving kid of the 1970’s to a Star Wars loving kid of the 2020’s.
StarWars.com: How did your Star Wars fandom start?
Darren Hayes: I’m an original trilogy kid. My experience with Star Wars was the ’70s, where George Lucas just completely changed the future of cinema. And I was not old enough to see Star Wars at the movies — I think I was a baby when it came out. But The Empire Strikes Back was the first movie I saw in a drive-in movie theater. We had the novelization of A New Hope and I loved the original Greg Hildebrandt artwork. They had maybe six or seven pages of color photographs in the middle of the novel, and I wasn’t old enough to read it but I was fascinated by the design. And then it was on television which was a big, big deal! It was simulcast on FM radio so you could listen in stereo and I was just blown away.
And then really it’s that whole hero’s journey. And I really relate a lot of my life to a lot of those George Lucas and Joseph Campbell reassuring tropes about the journey through life, that we were born with the potential for greatness and that it’s the choices in our life that determine the person that we are. As a young kid I grew up in a difficult family situation. My dad was an alcoholic and he was violent. And later realized that I was gay. So as a young kid, I had a lot of reasons to be inward and disappear into my imagination. But Luke Skywalker was this hero where he literally looked out from his homestead to the stars and imagined that there was a bigger story that he wanted to be a part of. And it just really connected with me.
