Leia Lives On Through Billie Lourd In The Rise Of Skywalker

Carrie Fisher may have passed away before she may film her scenes for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker as Leia Organa, yet her daughter Billie Lourd was able to keep her legacy alive thanks to the magic of technology.


Warning: this blog post contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.


Several of Leia's scenes scene scattered during The Rise of Skywalker were brought to life using unused footage the team put with each other from The Force Awakens. Much of it was woven into newly-written scenes that made sense in the dialogue of the footage obtainable. However one flashback that needed to occur needed more imagery of Leia that the leftover footage wouldn't have the ability to provide.


The scene in question would show how young Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) taught Leia how to use the Force. While ILM Visual Effects was able to with little effort de-age Hamill for his role, they couldn't do the same with Fisher. J.J. Abrams wasn't interested in making a fully CGIed version of Leia for the scene, so they turned to Fisher's daughter Billie Lourd to act as a body double. In essence, Billie "became" her mother, and took over as Fisher's face was simply added on immediately after filming.


"It was an emotional thing for everybody to be able to see her in that position," mentioned ILM Visual Effects supervisor Patrick Tubach, speaking to Yahoo! Entertainment. "It felt wonderful for us, also. If you’re going to have someone play [Fisher’s] part, it’s excellent that it’s [Billie] because there really 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."


Lourd also appears in the film as Lieutenant Connix, though her brief role as Leia was still a massively critical one.


"Billie was playing her mother," mentioned Tubach. "It was a poignant thing, and something that nobody took lightly — that she was prepared to stand in for her mom."