Why Jodie Foster turned down playing Princess Leia

The Force was almost with Jodie Foster.

Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster revealed Wednesday that she was once offered the iconic 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 new HBO series, “True Detective: Night Country.”

“I saw this on the internet, it resurfaced somehow,” Fallon, 49, said. “That you were offered the role of Princess Leia from ‘Star Wars.’”

“I was, yeah,” Foster confirmed. “And they were going for a younger, you know, Princess Leia, but I had a conflict.”

“I was doing a Disney movie, and I just didn’t want to pull out of the Disney movie because I was already under contract so I didn’t do it,” the “Silence of the Lambs” star added. “And you know, they did an amazing job.”

“I don’t know how good I would have been,” Foster admitted, before joking that if she had been cast she “might have had different hair.”

“I might have gone with a pineapple,” Foster joked, referring to Leia’s iconic space buns in the 1977 film “Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.”

The role ultimately went to Carrie Fisher, who starred as the interstellar princess-turned-general over the course of five films and whose likeness was digitally added into the saga’s final film in 2019 after she unexpectedly died in 2016 at the age of 60.

Instead of starring in the space opera, Foster appeared as Casey Brown, an orphan who is recruited to find 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 Daily 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 the most. Amy Irving and Jodie. And I got it.” 

Fisher wasn’t the only one who almost didn’t star in 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 think. And that was it. And that may or may not have been Han Solo,” Englund, 76, said. “I was dressed for ‘Apocalypse Now,’ so I was sort of sexy military, or as sexy as this old face could be back then.”