With Luke out of commission for the Star Wars sequel trilogy’s entire first movie, and Han killed off before the final two, that left Leia to take on the role of the new cast’s main mentor figure, with the original plan for the trilogy clearly involving her playing a major part in all three films. A smart decision, given the character’s lifelong experience as a leader, and definitely more clever than having Luke, who frequently takes solo diversions, take charge. Unfortunately, tragedy struck in the real world shortly a year after The Force Awakens’ release, when Carrie Fisher passed away during a transatlantic flight. Though the actress had already filmed enough scenes for The Last Jedi for her part in the movie to be written around seamlessly enough, this left The Rise of Skywalker in an unfortunate situation, especially for the close of the character’s arc.
The film’s response to this was to utilize previously unused footage of Leia from The Force Awakens for her role in Episode 9, which was vague enough to apply to many different types of conversations, and have other characters respond to Leia in a way that filled in the missing parts of her dialogue. In the film, the implication seems to be that Leia is leading her mentees to intuit her meaning on their own, rather than spoonfeeding them their next steps forward as characters. The actual result is more mixed, with some critics calling out Leia’s dialogue in the film as awkward and giving off somewhat of a Lassie effect (What, girl? The Emperor is back?). But given the mixed reaction to the CGI recreation of the also deceased actor Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin in Rogue One, it seems this choice was made out of respect for Fisher, to avoid a similar backlash and instead allow her to close out Leia’s saga personally, even if posthumously.
That is, except for one scene, where The Rise of Skywalker not only digitally recreates Carrie Fisher’s face, but also digitally de-ages her to look more like she did in the original trilogy. This scene comes about two-thirds of the way into the movie, and depicts Leia’s time training to become a Jedi with Luke in the years before the sequel trilogy takes place. The scene is a smart choice, serving at once as a cathartic culmination for the latent Force sensitivity that’s been built into the character since Return of the Jedi confirmed she was Luke’s sister, a blow struck for women who grew up feeling that Leia not becoming a Jedi robbed them of a fully realized hero, and an explanation for the Jedi expertise Leia shows in the film when taking over Rey’s training after Luke passed away in The Last Jedi.
However, unlike with Tarkin in Rogue One, there’s a catch. While Mark Hamill was able to reprise his role as Luke for the flashback, with the team simply applying a digital de-aging effect to the actor’s face, they still needed a body double to play a pre-digitized Leia, whose features they would then edit in post. With Carrie Fisher gone, her daughter, Billie Lourd, instead offered to play the role.
“Billie was playing her mother,” ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Tubach told Yahoo Entertainment on January. “It was a poignant thing and something that nobody took lightly — that she was willing to stand in for her mom.”
Along with being Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd is an accomplished performer of her own, playing Chanel #3 in Fox’s Scream Queens and several major characters across American Horror Story’s many anthology seasons. In Star Wars, she also plays the role of Lieutenant Kaydel Connix, an officer serving under Leia in the sequel trilogy’s Resistance.
“It was an emotional thing for everybody to see her in that position. It felt great for us, too,” Tubach continued. “If you’re going to have someone play [Fisher’s] part, it’s great that it’s [Billie] because there are a lot of similarities between them that we were able to draw from. The real challenge was just making the Leia footage we had to work with fit in that scene.”
The Rise of Skywalker director J.J. Abrams has previously spoken about not wanting to do a digital Leia for the film, nor wanting to re-cast her, but still making her central to the movie regardless. It was a tricky path to walk, one thing that is unequivocally not the film’s fault, and it seems that this pushed Abrams to at least somewhat rethink his position of not doing a digital Leia. However, for such a meaningful scene, and for the difficult situation presented, casting Lourd as Leia is a smart way to compromise while still paying tribute to Fisher’s legacy.
The Rise of Skywalker has been no stranger to controversy since its release, but I can’t imagine a better way this scene, which I as a female Star Wars fan really appreciated seeing, could have been filmed.
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