When you watch A New Hope, it’s easy to believe Princess Leia truly despised Grand Moff Tarkin. From the moment she glares across the Death Star conference room and snaps,
“Governor Tarkin, I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board,” you can feel the venom in her voice.
But behind the scenes? Carrie Fisher couldn’t have hated Peter Cushing if she hadn’t tried.
According to The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind the Original Film by J.W. Rinzler, Fisher actually went into filming determined to treat Cushing like the enemy her character saw him as. But that plan didn’t last long. Cushing — one of the kindest, most soft-spoken men in Hollywood — made that completely impossible.
“He was just so nice, so gentle, so kind,” Fisher recalled. “I kept trying to be mad at him, but it was impossible.”
Cushing wasn’t just polite, he was old-school British courteous. Between takes, he’d apologize to everyone, check that the crew was comfortable, and speak in that calm, elegant voice that sounded like he’d stepped straight out of a BBC drama. Fisher once said he’d even take off his tight boots between takes to rest his feet, and that image alone made it impossible to see him as a terrifying Imperial commander.
Fisher later admitted in Star Wars Insider #94,
“It was difficult for me to hate Peter Cushing [as Tarkin] in the movie because, in real life, he’s a real sweetheart.”
That clash between her real affection for him and Leia’s fury became one of her favorite Star Wars memories. In Wishful Drinking, she joked about how strange it felt to hurl insults at someone so gentle, saying she actually had to fight the urge to apologize after delivering that famous “foul stench” line.
She even shared in The Making of Star Wars how much she struggled to act angry in that scene:
“Up until the scene with Peter Cushing, I was just running down corridors, and George didn’t talk that much to me. But in my scene with Peter, I was doing too sarcastic, and George wanted real anger. But I liked Peter Cushing so much that, in my mind, I had to substitute somebody else in order to get hatred for him. I had to say, ‘I recognized your foul stench…’ But the man smelled like linen and lavender.”
And knowing that just makes the scene even better. Leia looks like she’s full of rage, but Carrie was really just trying not to smile at how genuinely sweet Peter Cushing was.
Carrie Fisher, on acting opposite Peter Cushing, 1977
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