‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Star Carrie Fisher Says No to Leia Buns
Carrie Fisher’s iconic Princess Leia buns will likely not return with “The Force Awakens”. (Photo: Lucasfilm)
Over the years, Carrie Fisher has been public about many of her issues with playing Princess Leia. She hates her degrading slave bikini, which sold at auction for $96k in early October, and waged against it, once saying it was something “supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of Hell.” In a recent issue of Interview Magazine, she told her Episode VII co-star Daisy Ridley to “fight for your outfit. Don’t be a slave like I was.” She has admitted to feeling very self-conscious at the time. “What’s funny is I wish I had known I was a sex symbol at the time,” she told the New York Daily News. “Because I don’t think that way. I don’t look at myself even remotely that way…I’m an extremely self conscious and tense person…I did not know that I was pretty.”
Carrie Fisher has never been comfortable with her Slave Leia costume. (Photo: Lucasfilm)
Fisher also feels strongly about the iconic buns she sported in the franchise, calling them “a hair-don’t, instead of a hair do.” The original director George Lucas (the gauntlet has since been passed to JJ Abrams for the reprise) was inspired by culture, not trends. “I was working very hard to create something different that wasn’t fashion, so I went with a kind of southwestern, Pancho Villa woman, revolutionary look,” he told Time in 2002. He also drew from hairstyles of women from the Hopi tribe. Fisher doesn’t share the opinion. “It took them two hours to do that hairstyle. I’d come in at 5 in the morning, before anyone…Later on, I did Saturday Night Live…They clunked a hairpiece on, and it looked exactly the same,” she said at a Star Wars Q&A. Unlike the Slave Leia costume, she looks back on the hairstyle with humor alongside her resentment. “I’ve been begging them to do the gray buns. Granny Leia—cleaning up around the house, baking cookies in the shape of robots. Good ol’ Granny Leia…Who wouldn’t want that?” she said at the Hay Festival. Still, the hair adds to Fisher’s list of resentments about the franchise. “I weighed 105 [pounds] at the time,” she told NPR. “But 60 of those pounds were in my face. So a good idea would be, though, to give me a hairstyle that further widens my already wide face.”
Carrie Fisher after her recent weight loss. (Photo: Yahoo Style)
Weight has been a recurring struggle for Fisher, and The Force Awakens has opened some old wounds. She was asked to drop 35 pounds to reprise her character for the upcoming release, and even in 1977 when she was just 19 and 5’1”, 105 pounds, she was given the job with the caveat that she would lose 10 pounds. She later put on weight after struggling with bipolar disorder and a cocaine addiction, and losing the weight this time around has proven difficult for Fisher. “They don’t want to hire all of me — only about three quarters!” she told Good Housekeeping for their January 2016 cover story. “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.” She did shed the weight as asked, but took moral issue with the request. “We treat beauty like an accomplishment and that is insane. Everyone in LA says, ‘Oh you look good,’ and you listen for them to say you’ve lost weight. It’s never 'How are you?’ or 'You seem happy!’” Hollywood clearly has a long way to go before weight is no longer a topic of contentment. As for the buns, it looks like Fisher will get her way. “The buns are tired now — so no, you’re not going to have the futuristic buns,” she told Digital Spy. But it sounds like her character will sport another memorable hairstyle. “We have an alternate thing that I think you’ll be into — it’s not the metal bikini, I promise.”
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