Why George Lucas wouldn’t let Carrie Fisher wear underwear on ‘Star Wars’
Despite being set long ago in a galaxy far, far away, George Lucas didn’t always want Star Wars – his tale of space wizards battling an evil intergalactic empire – to totally abandon reality. Some of his attempts to adhere to real-life science could be seen as pretty strange, though. As a result, Carrie Fisher was given a truly cockamamie reason to explain why Princess Leia couldn’t wear underwear beneath her iconic white dress.
Over the years, Fisher was never shy about letting the world know how she felt about the flowing, shapeless white dress Leia wore in the original 1977 Star Wars. Amusingly, she once ranted to The Daily Beast, “I wore that damn white thing for the whole first movie” – and it’s tempting to wonder if her aggravation was rooted in Lucas’ insistence that she didn’t wear a bra under the dress.
In her hilarious memoir Wishful Drinking, Fisher stated that when her director revealed this unusual stipulation, she couldn’t help questioning him about it. She replied: “‘Okay, I’ll bite. Why?'” And Lucas said—likely with a completely straight face—”Because there’s no underwear in space.”
By any measure, that’s a pretty crazy sentence. But, in a 2010 interview with Blastr, an amused Fisher claimed Lucas didn’t just leave it at that perplexing statement, although it took many years for him to elaborate.
You see, he attended a performance of her one-woman show in San Francisco—also entitled Wishful Drinking—in 2008, and this is where he heard her tell the bra story to a rapt audience. He then promptly came backstage to chat with his former leading lady and gave her a semi-scientific reason for his no-underwear rule.
Fisher explained that Lucas informed her, “In space you get weightless, and so your flesh expands.” In this scenario, he was convinced that a bra wouldn’t expand along with the skin. So, in the end, a woman like Leia could wind up being strangled by her own brassiere.
Naturally, Fisher saw the funny side of Lucas’ theory and bit her tongue instead of simply letting him know that most bras are adjustable. In her memoir, she joked, “Now, I think that this would make a fantastic obit – so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”
Amusingly, eight years after Fisher spilt the beans on Lucas’ bra theory, a fan took it upon themselves to see if the rule also applied to the male characters in his saga, such as Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. Rachel Doddridge asked Mark Hamill, “Since the beautiful, late Carrie Fisher was convinced to not wear underwear under her costumes for Star Wars since ‘There’s no underwear in space,’ does that mean that you and Harrison went commando as well?”
Deciding that there was no point in lying – or simply taking the opportunity to have a bit of fun at Lucas’ expense – Hamill replied, “No. Can’t speak for Harrison, though.”
