Billie Lourd Played Princess Leia In The 'Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker' Flashback Scene
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Watch New Footage From 'Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker'
Finishing Leia's Story
This post contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker.
Despite the fact that Carrie Fisher passed away in 2016, the final Star Wars film, The Rise Of Skywalker was able to finish Princess Leia's story in a beautiful and sensitive way by using extra footage from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi.
We learned that Leia was Force sensitive and that she was training Rey to be a stronger Jedi.
Additionally, Leia was able to break through to her son, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo, and lead him back to the light by projecting a memory of his dead father, Han Solo, with her dying breath. It was a tragic but loving end to an iconic character.
Her Daughter Stepped In
One of the best parts of The Rise Of Skywalker was the flashback that showed a young Luke and Leia training with lightsabers, and a major part of that sequence was Fisher's daughter, Billie Lourd. ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Tubach explained that Lourd was the stand in who performed Leia's role.
"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... 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."
How The Visual Effects Team Pulled It Off
They used footage from Return Of The Jedi to recreate a time period appropriate Leia, but there was a limit to what they could actually use without dancing too close to the uncanny valley. Visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett explained:
"What you see is what we developed. The idea was to provide this great surprise where they take the helmets off, and you see Luke and Leia’s younger faces. We scoured outtakes from the original movies, and we took some pieces and then had to try and figure out the technical aspect of putting that shot together."
Taking Care Of Her Legacy
Director J.J. Abrams explained before the film that once he had the idea to use old footage to finish Leia's story, he couldn't shake the idea that this was the right thing to do.
"t’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball, but it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question. It has a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had. There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way because somehow it worked. And I never thought it would."
What a beautiful thing that Lourd could be involved in honoring her mother's legacy.
