It’s undeniable that Carrie Fisher was a rare talent — and she’d have to be, to charm the notoriously picky George Lucas with her Star Wars audition. In a recently resurfaced video, originally posted on YouTube in 2006, Fisher sits down to read a scene opposite Harrison Ford (whom Lucas initially didn’t want to cast, but he was so good in the screen tests that Ford became his Han Solo).
When you’re out promoting a movie, you’re often asked to do a lot of things, most of them pretty silly. With the amount of press the cast of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was being asked to do, there were asked to do a lot of silly things, none perhaps as silly as going on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and singing a medley of Star Wars music a cappella. But the entire cast — including Harrison Ford! — actually commits, and it actually turns out to pretty fun.
The original Star Wars was driven by nostalgia for pulp magazines, Saturday-morning serials, and a simpler era with clear-cut heroes and villains. The new Star Wars is driven by nostalgia for the original Star Wars, and a simpler era when that title evoked words like “adventure” and “excitement,” and not words like “the taxation of trade routes,” and “Jar Jar Binks.” The characters in Star Wars: The Force Awakens are all searching for something of great importance to the galaxy far, far away. I won’t reveal what this MacGuffin is, but I will tell you what it represents: that old Star Wars magic. Can director J.J. Abrams and the rest of the saga’s new creators find it?