Nearly 10 Years After Carrie Fisher Died, Her Daughter Calls ‘Star Wars’ ‘a High-Budget Home Video’

Billie Lourd has two small children. They know their grandmother the same way millions of strangers do, as Princess Leia.

Lourd doesn’t find that sad.

“It’s such a gift that they get to have those movies, it’s like a high-budget home video,” she said on The View Thursday. “They get to see my mom all the time.”

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Cohost Sara Haines asked what the kids make of seeing their grandmother on screen. Lourd said she had to explain the difference between Carrie Fisher and Princess Leia, and that it’s still hard for them to grasp at their age.

“It’s so special for me that I have that and that’s their way of getting to know her,” she said, “because she’s so much like that character.”

Fisher died after a medical incident on a plane in December 2016, nearly 10 years ago. Lourd’s grandmother, Debbie Reynolds, died the next day.

She Listens to Her Mother’s Voice in Airports

Lourd said she plays Fisher’s audiobooks all the time, and called it a singular experience to be “walking through LAX listening to my dead mom’s voice in my ear.”

The 34-year-old was there to talk about American Horror Story, whose 13th season premieres the same day. The conversation went to her mother instead, and to the strange upside of Fisher being Princess Leia, which is that other people keep her in the room.

“The thing about losing somebody is when they die, you don’t get to talk about them that much,” she said. “The awesome thing about her being that Princess Leia person is that so many people love her and have their own relationship with her. I get more of her in their stories.”

She’s Been Open About the Grief for Years

She marked the ninth anniversary of her mother’s death last December with a photo of Fisher and her father, Bryan Lourd, and she’s written plainly about what the loss feels like in between.

Fisher’s reach was never only Star Wars. A 1983 soft rock hit was inspired by her, and it still gets love to this day.