While it’s possible that the filmmaker meant it’s his favorite performance he’s seen while working personally with Hamill (the actor played the terrifying family lawyer Arthur Pym in Flanagan’s recent Netflix horror show “The Fall of the House of Usher”), it seems plausible that he could also be including performances he’s seen on screen. Could this new role really put Luke Skywalker, The Joker, and Fire Lord Ozai to shame? We won’t know for sure until the film hits theaters, but given Hamill’s track record with Flanagan — and Flanagan’s track record with King adaptations — it seems likely that it’ll be great.

During the ATX panel, the filmmaker actually brought up Hamill as an example of a monologue that apparently did make it into the movie, though he noted that there were other tough calls made in the editing bay. He admitted that one actor did a seven minute long monologue that turned out exactly the way Flanagan had wanted, yet was still cut from the movie when he realized he could communicate the same point solely via reaction shots. “I had to call the actor and say ‘I’m sorry, you did it right, I messed up,'” Flanagan recalled. “‘I wrote a scene that said out loud a bunch of stuff that I shouldn’t have said out loud because it was all there, and it was all there without the words.'”

Still, it sounds like the film, much like Hamill’s monologue, could be “a doozy.” When production wrapped last November, Flanagan took to X (formerly Twitter) to celebrate, calling “The Life of Chuck” a “tenacious little miracle of a movie” and noting that he’s “elated that it’s going to exist in the world.” The novella adaptation does not yet have a release date.