Carrie Fisher spent most of her life being introduced as Princess Leia, and she handled it with the kind of wit that made her the funniest person in pretty much every room she walked into. The career she built outside that galaxy is stranger and richer than most fans realize. She made her film debut at 18 opposite Warren Beatty in Shampoo, turned up with a flamethrower and a rocket launcher as the jilted Mystery Woman in The Blues Brothers, delivered a memorable turn in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, and quietly walked off with When Harry Met Sally while Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan were busy falling in love. She also spent years doing work behind the camera that most of her fans have never heard about. Very little of that gets mentioned in the same breath as the cinnamon bun hairdo, which is a shame, because some of her sharpest work happened far away from a lightsaber.
One of those roles has had an unusually good year. When Peacock rebooted a 1989 comedy she co-starred in back in February, the writers had to name the couple at the center of the new version, and they picked a surname anyone paying attention would recognize. The husband and wife moving into a neighborhood where something is very wrong are the Fishers, a deliberate tribute to the woman who played Tom Hanks’ wife in the original. Hanks got a nod of his own, lending his face to a portrait of the neighborhood’s founder, and one of the original supporting players came back for a cameo. Most viewers probably never caught the reference, and that feels right for a performance being honored is one of the most overlooked she ever gave. The movie is Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs.
In The ‘Burbs, Fisher played Carol Peterson, wife of Hanks’ increasingly unhinged Ray, and the role on paper is thankless. Carol is the sane one. She is the person who watches her husband and his neighbors work themselves into a frenzy over the family across the street and asks, reasonably, what on earth they think they are doing. Roles like that usually disappear into the wallpaper, because the comedy belongs to the men behaving badly.
A lot of this was invented on the spot, which makes the role very different from how it reads on paper. The film went into production on May 19, 1988, the exact day the Writers Guild strike began, which meant screenwriter Dana Olsen was barred from rewriting anything once cameras rolled. Dante hired him as an actor so he could stay on set without violating union rules, shot the whole picture in sequence, and let the cast improvise their way through it.
Dante has been specific about who did the heavy lifting here. Speaking to LA Weekly days after Fisher’s death in December 2016, he said “the majority of the improvs were between Tom and Carrie,” naming the breakfast scene, the game show scene, and their final conversation as sequences that “improved exponentially, often on the first take.” He called her “a delight to work with” and “a total pro,” said she was “full of ideas and not shy about expressing them,” and finished with the line that should settle the argument: “it wouldn’t be as good without Carrie.”
Absolutely not, and anyone telling you otherwise is overselling it. When Harry Met Sally came out the same year, and Fisher’s Marie is the performance people point to when they want to argue she was more than Leia. Slate’s Heather Schwedel called it “a perfect performance that set a standard most romantic-comedy best friend parts and B-plot romances won’t ever come close to topping.” The film sits in the National Film Registry. If somebody asks what her best non-Star Wars movie is, that is the correct answer and it’s not particularly close.
The case for The ‘Burbs is a different one. It is the role that got missed in a film that got missed. Vincent Canby reviewed it for The New York Times in 1989 and called it “as empty as something can be without creating a vacuum.” Dante told Paste he felt he was “in movie jail because the reviews are so bad,” even while fans kept stopping him in public to tell him they loved it. The film opened at number one, made $49 million against an $18 million budget, and then spent three decades slowly turning into the movie of Dante’s that people bring up second, right after Gremlins. Fisher’s work aged with it. Carol is funnier on a rewatch than she is the first time, because the joke depends on how completely she refuses to participate in the nonsense happening around her.
Here is where the whole question of her best work outside Star Wars gets more interesting, because it may not involve acting at all. Fisher wrote Postcards from the Edge as a novel in 1987 and adapted it herself for Mike Nichols in 1990, earning a BAFTA nomination for the screenplay. That remains her only official feature writing credit, which is misleading, because she spent years as one of the most in-demand script doctors in Hollywood, doing uncredited rewrites on Hook, Sister Act, Lethal Weapon 3, The Wedding Singer, Outbreak, and the Star Wars prequels, among others.
Shane Black once told Empire that hiring her could cost as much as $100,000 per week. Her stated specialty, per her own account, was fixing the women: “Make the women smarter, and the love scenes better.” It is a body of work most people have no idea she was responsible for, which is a fitting career for somebody who spent her most famous role being underestimated by everyone in the room.
The 1989 film is streaming free on Tubi and YouTube, and the Peacock series has since been renewed for a second season after becoming the biggest launch day for any Peacock original, which means an entire new audience is about to meet a family named Fisher without knowing why.
