Lucasfilm(NEW YORK) — Forty-two years after Star Wars first took fans to a galaxy far, far away, director J.J. Abrams said Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the final chapter of the epic series, is finally finished.
While the movie’s secrets are still intact, that might not have been the case, thanks to a missing script, Abrams told Good Morning America on Monday.
Without revealing who, he said one of the actors, “left it under their bed and it was found by someone who was cleaning their place and it was given to someone else who then went to sell it on eBay.”
“Someone at the company said there’s a script that looks like it’s a legit script that’s for sale on eBay,” Abrams said. “They got it back before it sold.”
The director, 53, said one of the greatest opportunities in bringing the decades-long journey to a finale was their ability to utilize unused footage of the late Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia, in order to incorporate her character into the story one last time. Fisher died in December 2016.
“It was impossible for us to figure out how to tell the end of the Skywalker saga without Leia. She’s such an important character, and Carrie, we needed to have her in the movie,” said Abrams. So they rearranged unused footage of the character from The Force Awakens to give Fisher and Leia a fitting send-off, he explained.
Abrams added some of Fisher’s new scenes “are really moving and it’s impossible for me to believe she’s not there.”
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is in theaters nationwide on Dec. 20 from Disney, parent company of ABC News.
Copyright © 2019, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.