Carrie Fisher's Daughter Billie Lourd Was the Stand In Actress Who Portrayed Leia in Rise of Skywalker Flashback Scene

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker had the difficult task of including and honoring the late beloved actress Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the films since the beginning. Luckily, the team who created the film had access to the extra footage that had not been used in the previous films, so they were able to include her using editing movie magic, and a surprisingly perfect stand in for that special flashback scene.

In a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment (via /film), ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Tubach explained that Mark Hamill played young Luke in that scene, and they just had to digitally de-age him in post, but it was trickier getting the shots of young Leia, without Fisher able to stand in. So they got the next best thing with her daughter, Billie Lourd. Tubach explained:

“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.”

I thought it all worked out beautifully, and I bet Fisher would have been really happy with their choice to include her daughter in the role of her younger self. What did you think of this scene?