There’s one actress that I sincerely miss with all my heart, and that is Carrie Fisher. A little piece of me still hurts everyday knowing that she’s not with us, but I bet it hurts even more for her daughter Billie Lourd. As you know, The Rise of Skywalker was a box office hit. To me J.J Abrams did an amazing job tying everything together. Now if you remember (fair game you all had time to see it) the flashback scene where you see Luke training Leia to be a Jedi, and you can clearly see that it is a young Luke and a young Leia as well.
Mark Hamill reprises his role as the young Luke Skywalker, but what you probably didn’t know is that Billie Lourd played her mother in that scene. Yes Billy the one who played lieutenant Kaydel Ko Connix in the Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker. She actually played her mother’s role in the flashback.
“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,” Terrio confirmed with The Hollywood Reporter. “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.”
“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.”
If you ask me that was a beautiful tribute to her mother, now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be in my room crying.