The Hilarious Truth Behind Star Wars’ Greatest Villain

While that first Star Wars film had captivating battles with blasters and lightsabers, the one scene where Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing interacted together featured a different kind of fight: verbal sparring. As soon as she sees Tarkin, Leia unloads on the guy, saying, “I should have expected to find you holding Vader’s leash. I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board.”

Before this Star Wars scene ends with the destruction of Alderaan, we get to learn more about Peter Cushing’s character thanks to the actor’s chilly (and chilling) line deliveries. He’s the ice to Leia’s fire, and he decides to blow up an entire planet with a truly dispassionate creepiness. Interestingly, though, it was very difficult for Carrie Fisher to find the authentic anger she needed to make this scene work.

This Star Wars scene helps establish how much her character hates Peter Cushing’s character and that Leia and Tarkin clearly have a beef with each other that goes way back. Unfortunately, Carrie Fisher was having trouble channeling that anger for several reasons. One of the reasons was that she was a huge fan of the other actor’s work, so she “had to substitute somebody else in order to get the hatred for him.”

As mentioned before, another reason that Star Wars icon Carrie Fisher had to imagine somebody else instead of Peter Cushing is due to him smelling so nice. Leia accuses him of having such a “foul stench” that she could smell it as soon as she was brought aboard the Death Star, making it sound like Tarkin is the smelliest guy in a galaxy far, far away. In reality, Cushing smelled like “linen and lavender,” making it that much harder for Fisher to even fake being angry with him.

Perhaps because of these different factors, Star Wars creator George Lucas had to give her more directive feedback about the confrontation with Peter Cushing. She noted how Lucas gave very few directions when she was simply “running down corridors,” but he was more critical of the Leia/Tarkin scene because, as Fisher says, “I was doing too sarcastic and George wanted real anger.” It might have taken imagining a completely different dude in Cushing’s place, but Fisher was able to summon up enough anger to make this scene convincing.

And that’s the strange Star Wars tale of Peter Cushing smelling so good that it made this scene infinitely harder for a young Carrie Fisher. In retrospect, the only thing that could have made all of this more surreal is if Harrison Ford was in the room and doing lines in character as Han Solo. Then, if Fisher verbalized how nice Cushing smelled, Ford could hit her with the sarcastic line he once used on Chewbacca: “What an incredible smell you’ve discovered!”