An excellent excerpt from the Standard Speaker, Hazelto, Pennsylvania, Sunday, December 13, 2015, by Meridith Woerner.
PRINCESS Fisher would know what it takes to make a lasting legacy in this franchise. The first few precious moments of 'A New Hope" follow the angry revolutionary pulling together a contingency plan to smuggle spy documents off a spaceship. Unafraid of being taken hostage by the nefarious Empire, Princess Leia blasts the invading Imperial Stormtroopers. Leia shoots first. In captivity, Leia proceeds to throw some truly galactic shade: "Darth Vader, only you could be so bold," "Gov. Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vad-er's leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board." The classic, "Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"
While Han Solo shirks responsibility and Luke Skywalker fumbles around with his evolving, boyish perception of the hero, Leia gets things done. When her rescue goes awry, she grabs the blaster and finds a way out. She's not just a princess but a radical fighting for freedom under a tyrannical empire. "She had contempt for and worked with men, and I liked that," Fisher says.
"There was something human about her. It showed that she could do whatever she needed; if she could do that, everybody could do it. People identified with her. She's like a superhero." The new film reintroduces Leia 30 years after the war. She's no longer a princess but a general. And she's still very much in command "still walking and talking," Fisher says.
"She doesn't have any mortal wounds or disease." But, she warns, "things have happened that have been difficult." Fisher was mum on the rest of her character's details but didn't mind sharing a moment of nostalgia she felt on the set of the new film: "You're so self-conscious, you're exhausted before you get out of your trailer. I was in my trailer in the back, and I heard Harrison. I recognized how his boots sounded and heard him say, 'Is Carrie here?'
That was funny. That was like we're back on 'Star Wars' campus." In response to this reporter's surprise that the actress who brought to life Princess Leia, general of the new resistance, was self-conscious, Fisher let out a guffaw "I think everyone thinks the same way only (some) people pretend better. 'I'm going to do badly this time. I look like... The new people are better. What am I going to do? My hair looks bad again.'
Fisher may still get nervous, but that doesn't change her legacy, Nor did it stop her tenacious response about the recent kerfuffle over her character's notorious bikini. A frustrated father in Dept-ford, Pennsylvania, went viral in a Fox 29 report over a Target store selling Princess Leia action figure toys dressed in the divisive "slave Leia" ensemble (a metal two-piece the character was forced to wear while prisoner to character Jabba the Hutt). The man was perturbed it was being sold in the toy aisle and flustered over how he would explain the toy's chain to his daughters. "How about telling his daughter that the character is wearing that outfit, not because she's chosen to wear it? She's been forced to wear it," Fisher advises.
"She's a prisoner of a giant testicle who has a lot of saliva going on, and she does not want to wear that thing, and it's ultimately that chain, which you're now indicating is some sort of accessory that is used to kill the giant saliva testicle ... . That's asinine." So truly, the contempt for the scruffy-looking nerf-herders of the world is very much alive and well in Fisher.
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