In addition to playing a Resistance lieutenant, Carrie Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd had a special second role in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”
Lourd stepped in to play Princess Leia during the short flashback scene in “Episode IX.”
“Billie was playing her mother,” Industrial Lights & Magic visual effects supervisor Patrick Tubach told Yahoo Entertainment. “It was a poignant thing, and something that nobody took lightly — that she was willing to stand in for her mom.”
During the scene, a young Luke Skywalker, who is played by Mark Hamill, is training his sister to be a Jedi. At one point, both of them take off helmets to show their younger faces. For a few moments, you’re seeing Lourd combined with images of Fisher from “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi.”
Here’s a reference of how Leia looks in most of “Return of the Jedi.” The look is reminiscent of how we see her in the new film.
(Lucasfilm)
“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,” added Tubach. “The real challenge was just making the Leia footage we had to work with fit in that scene.”
The ILM team told Insider that bringing Fisher back was “a gigantic puzzle.” The team utilized previously unused footage from director J.J. Abrams’ “The Force Awakens” to help bring her to life.
“When you see Leia in ‘Episode IX,’ basically it’s a live-action element of her face with a completely digital character,” visual effects supervisor Roger Guyett told Insider.
This article originally appeared on Insider. Follow @thisisinsider on Twitter.
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