PETALING JAYA• Hollywood actor Mark Hamill tweeted that he stumbled into a nation of fans, following an earlier post where he mistook the Malaysian flag for the somewhat similar-looking American flag.

The 68-year-old actor, who is best known for playing Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films, played along with the general amusement.

"Now that we all have had a good laugh at my expense for mistaking a TEENY-TINY flag of Malaysia for a TEENY-TINY Old Glory, the fact remains the same," he tweeted. "No country measures their worth in money (also, I accidentally blundered into a LOAD of Malaysian followers)."

On Monday, he tweeted about deleting his Facebook account in protest against the social media platform's decision to allow political campaigns to continue using targeted advertisements, even ones that contain falsehoods, to reach out to users.

However, he mistakenly used the Jalur Gemilang emoji instead of the American flag when trying to say patriotism is more important than profit. He later responded to his own tweet, with an emoji of the correct flag.

The flag swop prompted replies by Malaysian fans, who tweeted their support for Hamill's stance while others made Star Wars-related jokes, in reference to his iconic role as Skywalker in the movie franchise.

Hamill has 3.6 million followers on Twitter where he tweets frequently to interact with fans. His now-deleted Facebook page had over 900,000 followers.

THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK