General Leia will not appear in Star Wars: Episode IX in the wake of Carrie Fisher’s untimely death last year, but the iconic character will be all over the upcoming The Last Jedi. Oscar Isaac, who plays the gifted X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, recalled shooting a scene with their two characters over and over again, and says things got “pretty intense.”
“It was basically my first day [on set] and we did about 25 takes total,” Isaac told Business Insider while on the red carpet for his latest movie, The Promise. “Half of them were on me and half of them were on her. I can’t give anything away but there was a scene where there was some physicality there and it was shot just over and over and over. She relished the physicality of it, let me just say. It was pretty intense. It will be funny to see what they cut together based on that.”
It’s unclear how exactly the two are going to interact, but it makes sense that General Leia, Poe’s boss in the Resistance, would be a little stressed. Sure, they were able to destroy Starkiller Base at the end of The Force Awakens, but not before the First Order demolished an entire New Republic system. That, plus Han Solo is dead and Leia’s child, Ben, is still pretty evil as Kylo Ren.
So, if she’s a little worked up while demanding results from her flying ace, we couldn’t be all that surprised. These are stressful times. However, if Leia’s stressed, Fisher wasn’t while they were filming.
“At every moment she would just wander over with her Coke — she was constantly drinking Coca-Cola — and find a way to undercut the situation or to cut through something to make me laugh,” Isaac told Business Insider.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits theaters on December 15, 2017.
