Star Wars icon Carrie Fisher’s off-screen life will always carry a note of infamy, due to the writer/actress’s hard-partying misadventures, which often involved drugs and/or alcohol. Fisher addresses her experiences with LSD in particular, as part of Netflix‘s hit new documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics. And, in true Carrie Fisher fashion, we get a story that involves Fisher tripping on acid; a little bit of Star Wars nostalgia; and a little bit of nudity, for good measure. If nothing else, it’s a pretty perfect snapshot of what the Carrie Fisher experience is all about – and why we miss her so much.
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Here’s the story of Carrie Fisher being recognized as Star Wars‘ Princess Leia, while she happened to be topless and on LSD:
First, Fisher describes that she had “one long pretty good” trip as a frequent LSD user. She had “outfits that went with acid; music that went with acid; makeup that went with acid,” and basically viewed LSD as a “ritual drug.” Her house is shown in the documentary, and it definitely has a some trippy themes to its decorum, with trinkets that were clearly made and placed to be stared at while high.
When it comes to the actual anecdote about her LSD Leia encounter, Fisher is hilariously her stereotypical self, first challenging the very idea of making orderly narrative out of your broken-consciousness drug experiences. But when it comes time to tell the tale, the actress doesn’t hold back:
“Hi I’m Carrie Fisher. I took a lot of LSD… So, I would organize trips around to places in the world, simply to take acid there. I would do these things and forget that I looked like someone named Princess Leia – or whatever I was for people – and so it’s not a brilliant idea to then, you know, take acid and go running around.
So yeah, I went to the Seychelles. And we took acid and oh my god, I was on the beach, and there was no one else on the beach. And so I’m with my Super 8 movie camera, that’s when this was. And I’m filming my friend, and as this is going along, suddenly I sensed that there’s been a disturbance in the Force. Don’t put that in. [Ed Note: they did keep that in.]
Anyway, I turn around – and by the way I’m… I can’t imagine that I’m nude, but certainly I’m topless. And we turn around, and there are a busload of Japanese folk that have just arrived, and it turns out where we are, it’s where they bring the tourists to have lunch from all the hotels. I am at that time, I believe, Princess Leia in a profound way, and not clothed. I took acid and went, “Oh, I see. This makes sense.”
While this anecdote is hilarious (and classic Carrie Fisher), there is a deeper story behind it. Fisher makes pointed mention that she was not yet into her later years of actual drug abuse at this time in her life – and in fact, in a weird way, the LSD helped her through the rough points of her Star Wars fame. Later in her segment, Fisher reveals that when she was eventually diagnosed as bipolar, she told a doctor that acid had made her feel more normal than her regular mental state. The doctor then explains how the introspective nature of LSD may have actually kept Fisher grounded and centered, at a time in her life where the image of Princess Leia made that otherwise impossible.
Netflix’s Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics is now streaming and definitely worth checking out, if only to get more time with Carrie Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, and other great celebrity guests.
