Billie Lourd played Leia Organa during “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” filling the role made legendary by her mother.
What happened: ILM visual effects supervisor Patrick Tubach said Lourd played Leia in a flashback scene, which showed Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa going through lightsaber training, according to Yahoo Entertainment.
- Tubach: “Billie was playing her mother. It was a poignant thing, and something that nobody took lightly — that she was willing to stand in for her mom.”
- Tubach: “It was an emotional thing for everybody to see her in that position. It felt great for us, too, 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.”
- Mark Hamill played Luke Skywalker in the scene through de-aging CGI.
Flashback: Co-writer Chris Terrio told The Hollywood Reporter that the movie production used scenes of Leia Organa from “Return of the Jedi,” too.
- Terrio: “We also had access to the dailies from the original trilogy, and in the flashback of Luke and Leia, that image of Carrie comes from ‘Return of the Jedi.’ So, we had access to everything in the archive, which turned out to be super helpful. So, yeah, the original trilogy was on our table for the flashback and for audio. That said, Leia was a very different person in the new trilogy, and I’m not sure that we would’ve used any audio from the original trilogy. Her voice had changed, and obviously, she was older, wiser and had a different quality to her performance. So, I’m not sure we ended up using any audio from the original trilogy, and we tried to stay true to Carrie’s acting intentions as much as we could.”