‘It’s going to be a disaster’ – Carrie Fisher on the first ‘Star Wars’

The late Carrie Fisher called up her best friend and fellow actor, Griffin Dunne, in a panic over her hairstyle for the 1977 sci-fi film Star Wars , he has recalled, as she fretted that the project would be a “f***ing disaster”.

Dunne recounts his friendship with the late star in his new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, which is out on June 11 via Penguin Press.

In an extract published by The Times, Dunne recalls how he received a call from his long-time friend, whom he met through his younger brother when she came over to the family’s home for dinner.

“It was 1976 and one day Carrie said off-handedly that she had landed a job in some science-fiction movie shooting in England,” he wrote. “‘Is there a part in it for me?’ I asked, oblivious to what a normal person would say, like “Congrats” or “That’s great”.

“The only one you would have been right for is being played by Mark somebody,” Fisher apparently responded, referring to Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker. “It’s a really stupid script and you would have turned it down, I promise.”

Fisher, with whom Dunne shared a flat at the time, told him she was also acting opposite “some older guy named Harrison Ford”, whom he realised had worked as a carpenter for his aunt, the writer Joan Didion.

“Like an eager puppy, I’d handed him nails or dug for hardware from his worn canvas toolkit,” he said. “In return, he would slip me one of his Marlboros, the filters of which I clipped off because that’s what he did.

“Harrison cut me off from his endless relay of joints because his stuff was so strong that after one toke, I couldn’t tell the difference between a saw and a tape measure. I simply idolised the dude and hated my envy that Carrie would get to spend so much time with him.”

Fisher, who revealed she had a three-month affair with Ford in her 2016 memoir, grew anxious as the release date for Star Wars loomed on May 25,1997, and called Dunne in England in a panic over her wardrobe.

“‘You should see what they did to my hair,’ she had screamed into the phone on location. “I look like I’m wearing two bagels over my ears.’”

She added: “And I’m acting with an 8ft yeti and a four-foot Brit in a rolling trash can. This movie is going to be a f***ing disaster.”

Of course, Dunne went on to acknowledge, the film was far from a disaster, and his friendship with Fisher shifted as she shot to global fame as Princess Leia Organa, a leader of the Rebel Alliance.

Fisher died aged 60 in 2016, after suffering a heart attack on a flight from London to Los Angeles.