It’s always been pretty obvious that George Lucas made Star Wars up as he went along. Come on, Luke starts out as a wide-eyed farm boy and ends up as a dead-eyed Jedi. Darth Vader begins as a shiny black death cyborg villain and somehow winds up as Luke’s dear old wet-eyed dad. Let’s not even mention Leia going from love interest to sibling, because if it hadn’t been for the Force, this might have been the weirdest movie since Close My Eyes.
All of which makes the revelation that Jodie Foster was once offered the role of Leia Organa all the more intriguing. Speaking to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, Foster revealed this week that she turned down the opportunity to star in 1977’s blockbuster gamechanger because she would have had to break a contract for a Disney movie (almost certainly 1976’s Freaky Friday) filmed during the same period.
“They were going for a younger Princess Leia but I had a conflict,” revealed Foster. “I was doing a Disney movie and I just didn’t want to pull out of the Disney movie because I was already under contract.” She added: “And they did an amazing job. I don’t know how good I would have been. I might have had different hair. I might have gone with a pineapple.”
Foster would have been 13 or 14 during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, while Carrie Fisher (who won the role) was 19. Suffice to say, this would have changed the dynamic of Lucas’s movie just a little bit. Star Wars isn’t necessarily the most mature and sophisticated of science fiction sagas, but lowering the age of one of its central protagonists might have brought the era of Phantom Menace on us three decades too early. Harrison Ford’s Han Solo and Foster’s Leia would have had more of a daughter and father figure relationship, which might have provided its own unique dynamic, but certainly would have been a leap. Might Leia have ended up plunging that weird crossguard ’saber into Solo’s heart in the sequel trilogy instead of Kylo Ren?
Either way the original Star Wars trilogy would surely have lost some of its sparkle. There is something about genuine, crackling chemistry between romantic leads that conjures up the magic of golden age Hollywood, and the undeniable electricity between Ford and Fisher (which was based on a very real attraction) certainly aided Lucas in reimagining the glory of pulp 1930s space fantasy. Moreover, it helped Star Wars present as a movie for all ages, rather than just preteens. It may have been rated U in the UK (PG in the US), but it never feels like a movie made just for kids. Foster, despite the spiky venom that she was capable of from an early age (see Taxi Driver), might well have changed things.
It’s worth remembering here that things could have got even weirder. The list of actors once mooted for the role of Leia includes Sigourney Weaver, Sissy Spacek, Anjelica Huston and Meryl Streep. Weaver’s Leia might have been somewhere between the sultry impregnability of Ghostbusters’ Dana Barrett and the steely humanity of the Alien films’ Ellen Ripley. It’s hard to imagine the 25-year-old Huston handling Solo’s self-centred masculinity with anything other than scorn – likewise Meryl Streep – though the idea of the star sporting Leia’s head buns has a certain splendour to it. Surely Spacek would surely have been woefully miscast.
As a sliding doors moment though, the idea of Foster as Leia remains intriguing. What kind of a career would she have had as the face of Star Wars? Out of the three main stars of George Lucas’s saga, only Ford had much of a career in the years after the release of 1983’s Return of the Jedi, though there has been more recognition for Mark Hamill’s latter-day work (as well as a minor renaissance) in recent times. Surely Foster would have continued to flourish in Oscar bait dramatic fare and retained her position as a Star Wars legend. If so, it might not have taken 30 years to get Leia back on screen in 2015’s The Force Awakens. For that at least, it might have been worth giving up on Freaky Friday.
