Billie Lourd's kids are getting to know Carrie Fisher through Star Wars — in one scene, Leia is actually their mom
Billie Lourd went on daytime TV to plug a new season of AHS and came away with the most tender Star Wars story of the week. The kids know grandma mostly as a movie character — and one scene of that movie stars someone much closer to home.
Billie Lourd went on The View on Thursday to promote American Horror Story 13, which premieres on FX on September 24. Co-host Sara Haines asked something else: what do her kids make of seeing their grandmother on screen? Lourd said she has had to explain to son Kingston and daughter Jackson the difference between Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia, and that it's "hard for them to grasp."
"It's such a gift that they get to have those movies, it's like a high-budget home video," she said, as quoted by Entertainment Weekly. Fisher died in December 2016 after falling ill on a flight to Los Angeles. Debbie Reynolds, Lourd's grandmother, died the next day. For two kids born years later, Leia is the closest thing to meeting her.
The home video has a plot twist
The trickiest part of that explanation is still ahead of them. The Rise of Skywalker has a flashback of young Leia training with Luke, and the body in that scene belongs to Lourd. ILM visual effects supervisor Patrick Tubach confirmed she doubled for her mother, with Fisher's face rebuilt from Return of the Jedi outtakes, SlashFilm reported.
So for about a minute of the saga, grandma on screen is mom wearing grandma's face. Good luck explaining that one to a six-year-old.
In the only scene where young Leia picks up a lightsaber, the face is Carrie Fisher's and the body is Billie Lourd's.
That flashback is only one of Lourd's Star Wars credits:
- Lieutenant Connix. Her Resistance officer runs through all three sequel films, often a few feet from General Leia.
- Young Leia. The body double in the Rise of Skywalker training flashback.
- The Princess Diarist. In the audiobook of Fisher's last memoir, Carrie reads the story and Billie reads the diary entries and poems 19-year-old Carrie wrote while shooting the first film. It won Fisher a posthumous Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album.
- Star Wars Day. She has spent May 4 watching A New Hope with her kids.
Mom's voice at LAX
Lourd said she listens to her mother's audiobooks "all the time" and called walking through LAX "listening to my dead mom's voice in my ear" a "singular experience." If the book in her ears is The Princess Diarist, half the voices in it are her own.
"The awesome thing about her being that Princess Leia person is that so many people love her and have their own relationship with her. I get more of her in their stories." — Billie Lourd on The View
Fans supply the rest. At a recent convention, someone brought her a Band-Aid her mother had signed. At first the attention was "a lot," she said. Almost ten years on, she loves talking about her.
Her day job this fall is still horror. AHS 13 runs 13 episodes through an October 29 finale, and Lourd is also set to play Emma Borden in Netflix's Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story. The kids, for now, get the version of grandma with a blaster and cinnamon-bun hair. The signed Band-Aids can wait a few years.
Previously we wrote: Marvel is filing copyright claims to pull four leaked Endgame Encore scenes off X — here is what is in them
