We all love Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia — she’s one of the most iconic figures in Star Wars. But behind the scenes, her journey with the franchise wasn’t as glamorous as it looked on screen.
According to her longtime friend James Blunt, the pressures Fisher faced around her body image — especially when she was cast again for The Force Awakens — weighed heavily on her in her final years.
“She’d been really mistreating her body, and she’d just got the job again of being Princess Leia in a new Star Wars movie,” Blunt said while speaking at the Hay Festival about his new memoir. “I was with her the day before she died… She really put a lot of pressure on herself.”
That pressure wasn’t new. Fisher herself admitted publicly that she had been told to lose 35 pounds to reprise her role. She joked to Good Housekeeping U.K.: “They don’t want to hire all of me — only about three-quarters!” But she also cut through the humor with raw honesty: “Nothing changes, it’s an appearance-driven thing. I’m in a business where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance. That is so messed up. They might as well say get younger, because that’s how easy it is.”
Behind the jokes was a real pain. The pressure to look a certain way never really left her, and in the end, it became one more weight she carried alongside her lifelong struggles with addiction and mental health.
Blunt explained that Fisher often talked about this double standard in Hollywood. “She spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry, how men are allowed to grow old, and women are certainly not in film and TV.” He said those conversations haunted her, especially as she faced the pressure of stepping back into one of the most iconic roles in movie history.
According to Blunt, the stress took a serious toll. “She really put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs again and by the time she got on the plane, she had effectively killed herself.”
Fisher went into cardiac arrest on a flight from London to Los Angeles on December 23, 2016. She passed away four days later. Official reports from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office noted sleep apnea and “other undetermined factors” as the cause of death, and toxicology revealed cocaine, methadone, ethanol, and opiates in her system. Blunt reflected on that with brutal candor: “They say it was heart failure of some kind, but she had taken enough drugs to have a really good party.”
Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd offered the most powerful perspective at the time. In a statement to People, she said: “My mom battled drug addiction and mental illness her entire life. She ultimately died of it. She was purposefully open in all of her work about the social stigmas surrounding these diseases… I know my mom, she’d want her death to encourage people to be open about their struggles. Seek help, fight for government funding for mental health programs. Shame and those social stigmas are the enemies of progress to solutions and ultimately a cure.”
Carrie Fisher was more than Princess Leia — she was a truth-teller who never hid her flaws and always spoke up about the things most people would rather keep quiet. That’s why she mattered, both on-screen and off. And maybe the best way we can honor her now is by doing exactly what she did: fight the stigma, tell the truth, and never let anyone else decide our worth.