‘We were more like real siblings’
Mark Hamill remembers his late “Star Wars” co-star Carrie Fisher as not only his screen sibling but as almost a real-life sister.
“Carrie, she used to drive me crazy,” Hamill, 66, fondly recalled in an interview with Ellen DeGeneres on her daytime talk show last month. “I mean, we were more like real siblings than I really thought, because we’d have these huge fights. I’d say, ‘You’re just so full of yourself and I can’t stand it, and you think you’re Hollywood royalty’ and she’d say, ‘Well, y’know, you’re such a loser.’ ”
Yet, he went on, “We’d have these big fights and we wouldn’t see each other for months or even years and then you’d see each other again and remind yourself how much fun it was to be together, because not only could she make me laugh but I could make her laugh. And that was our goal.”
Hamill, who reprises his role as Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” which opens in theaters Friday, called Fisher, who died Dec. 27 at age 60, “an irreplaceable member of the family.
“But the whole world feels that way. We’re all sort of mourning her. And I always think of her in the present tense. I don’t think of her in the past. Because any time you were with her, it was just fun.”
She was, he said, “like a latter-day Auntie Mame,” the flamboyantly funloving grand dame of Dennis Patrick’s bestselling novel and subsequent Broadway and film hits. “She just looked at every day and tried to maximize as much fun as she could have in any given situation.”
Fisher, in one of her last roles, plays Gen. Leia Organa in “The Last Jedi.” Her daughter, “Scream Queens” actress Billie Lourd, reprises the role of Lt. Connix that she played in the first movie in the new trilogy, 2015’s “The Force Awakens.”
“It’s so great that Billie Lourd’s in the movie because you have that sort of continuity there,” Hamill said. “She’s so similar to her mother. … I mean,” he added, half-jokingly, “they ask me, ‘How is she similar to Carrie?’ And I say, ‘Well, for a start she was an hour and a half late to the airport!’ ”