The Force was almost with Jodie Foster.
Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster revealed Wednesday that she was once offered the enduring role of Princess Leia from the “Star Wars” franchise.
Foster, 61, made the revelation during an appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” while promoting her recent HBO series, “True Detective: Night Country.”
“I saw this on the web, it resurfaced in some way,” Fallon, 49, said. “That you simply were offered the role of Princess Leia from ‘Star Wars.’”
“I used to be, yeah,” Foster confirmed. “And so they were going for a younger, you understand, Princess Leia, but I had a conflict.”
“I used to be doing a Disney movie, and I just didn’t need to pull out of the Disney movie because I used to be already under contract so I didn’t do it,” the “Silence of the Lambs” star added. “And you understand, they did an incredible job.”
“I don’t know the way good I might have been,” Foster admitted, before joking that if she had been solid she “might need had different hair.”
“I might need gone with a pineapple,” Foster joked, referring to Leia’s iconic space buns within the 1977 film “Star Wars: Episode IV – A Recent Hope.”
The role ultimately went to Carrie Fisher, who starred because the interstellar princess-turned-general over the course of 5 movies and whose likeness was digitally added into the saga’s final film in 2019 after she unexpectedly died in 2016 on the age of 60.
As a substitute of starring within the space opera, Foster appeared as Casey Brown, an orphan who’s recruited to seek out a long-lost treasure in Disney’s 1977 film “Candleshoe.”
Several other high-profile actresses, including “Carrie” star Sissy Spacek, Sigourney Weaver, Anjelica Huston and Meryl Streep, were also reportedly offered the role.
In 2015, Fisher told the Day by day Beast that while she was aware that Foster had been asked, she had no idea she had beaten Streep.
“I’ve never heard that one,” Fisher told the outlet. “But Jodie Foster was up for it… That one I knew probably the most. Amy Irving and Jodie. And I got it.”
Fisher wasn’t the just one who almost didn’t star within the multimillion-dollar franchise.
Business Insider reported in 2023 that “A Nightmare on Elm Street” actor Robert Englund had auditioned for the role of the scoundrel Han Solo, which went to Harrison Ford.
“And, for five seconds, they saw me. They literally took a Polaroid of me, I feel. And that was it. And that will or may not have been Han Solo,” Englund, 76, said. “I used to be dressed for ‘Apocalypse Now,’ so I used to be kind of sexy military, or as sexy as this old face might be back then.”