Carrie Fisher’s Brother Reveals The Original Plan For Leia In ‘Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker’

Carrie Fisher passed away in December 2016, but Leia Organa will appear in The Rise of Skywalker, which comes out just over three years after her death, using old footage from The Force Awakens. “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball,” the film’s director J.J. Abrams said about Fisher’s involvement in Episode IX. “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.” It’s unknown how much of Rise of Skywalker‘s script had to be updated following Fisher’s passing, but it sounds like a substantial amount, according to her brother.

“She was going to be the big payoff in the final film,” Todd Fisher recently told Yahoo Entertainment. “She was going to be the last Jedi, so to speak. That’s cool, right” The Rise of Skywalker would have shown her Jedi powers in full force, instead of a brief tease in The Last Jedi (who, as Rian Johnson has confirmed, refers to Luke). “People used to say to me, ‘Why is it that Carrie never gets a lightsaber and chops up some bad guys’ Obi-Wan was in his prime when he was Carrie’s age!” Fisher added.

“The truth is that J.J. Abrams was great friends with Carrie… He had an extraordinary sense of love for her,” her brother says. It was that love that led the filmmaker to make a bold, and creatively risky decision: take unused footage of Leia left over from The Force Awakens and make it part of The Rise of Skywalker. “They had eight minutes of footage,” Fisher said. “They grabbed every frame and analyzed it… and then reverse-engineered it and [got] it into the story the right way. It’s kind of magical.” (Via)

It’s a shame that we won’t get to see the original idea for Leia, but at least she won’t die from a broken heart. I mean, probably