Billie Lourd played Leia during that flashback scene in The Rise of Skywalker!

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) do incredible visual effects work on Star Wars and other franchises, and that was certainly the case in The Rise of Skywalker.

Recently, ILM released a video detailing some of their work on the film, and it’s a fascinating look at the process. We get a chance to see a number of different iterations of certain scenes, and one of the more incredible parts of the process is how General Leia Organa was brought to life in the film.

Check out the video:

One of the coolest things, though, was the chance to see how that beautiful flashback sequence was made. In the film, Luke Skywalker tells Rey about how he trained Leia Organa in the ways of the Force. We get to see the two of them training at night on Ajan Kloss – Luke with his green lightsaber and Leia with her blue lightsaber – and then they lift their training helmets up to reveal their faces, looking exactly like they did in the original trilogy.

The reason they look exactly the same is because ILM actually used images from the original trilogy and overlaid them on the actors’ faces. So the image of Leia’s face in the helmet was taken directly from Return of the Jedi, which is pretty cool.

Even cooler, though, is the fact that Billie Lourd played Leia in that scene. Lourd, of course, is the real-life daughter of Carrie Fisher. She has a role in the sequel trilogy as Lietenant Connix, but in this film also got a chance to bring her mother’s iconic character to life. That must have been an incredibly emotional experience for Lourd, but what a great tribute to not only portray her mother’s character, but also to show that her mother truly did train in the ways of the Force. That’s awesome!

Here, you can see Lourd as Leia, and then in the next image see what it looked like once the image of Leia from ROTJ was overlaid on top for the face.

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ILM does incredible work, and because of them (and Billie Lourd), we were able to finally see Leia Organa use a lightsaber. And that’s really freaking cool.