TM2YC said:
If anybody can pull it off then Meryl can but why did they do this? I thought they had some clever plan to get around not have Leia. If they didn't then why didn't they hastily have Leia die in the scene where she dies and have Luke not die in the scene where he didn't have to die. Change all the mentions of Leia in the Ep9 script to Luke and it's done (Not that I didn't think Luke's death wasn't a brilliant sequence in TLJ).
"Clever plan"?
Lucasfilm? Did ya
see the last two Episodes?
It's too late for that in any case, and removing Leia from parts of
TLJ would have required awkward and sad reshoots.
I'm of two minds on Leia in
Episode IX. On the one hand, to bring her back via recasting would be a bit weird given how much emphasis both
TLJ's heroes and villains put on moving on from the past. On the other hand, for the last living hero of the OT/Skywalker family to just up and vanish from the saga in the final installment of nine Episodes (for now) would be weird, and not something anyone would remotely consider were Fisher still around. Furthermore, no disrespect to Fisher, but Leia barely did anything in
TFA or
TLJ, so it's not as though living up to those performances from an acting standpoint would take all that much.
I saw this on MovieWeb...
And honestly, though I doubt Kylo will ever become a compelling and/or satisfying character, and I dread any soap opera interaction between him and Leia, that image just about wins me over to the Draft Streep idea. I still fear that
Ep IX will end up rehashing
RotJ (rehashing
ANH and
TFA), but even
if Abrams does something entirely new, such as the
quest story I suggested earlier, I have no instinctual objection to Streep filling in, for either a major or minor role. The Show, after all, Must Go On.