How Carrie Fisher’s Daughter, Billie Lourd, Has Kept Her Mom’s ‘Star Wars’ Legacy Alive While Forging Her Own Path
The actress, 33, has shared many emotional tributes to her mom—and she just showed her own kids 'Star Wars'
As the daughter of Star Wars icon Carrie Fisher and the granddaughter of Golden Age stars Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, Billie Lourd is third-generation Hollywood royalty. In 2015, she made her screen debut in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, playing Resistance Lieutenant Konnix opposite her mom, who reprised her famous role as General (formerly Princess) Leia Organa. Lourd returned to the franchise in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (which featured one of Fisher’s final performances and was released in 2017, the year after her untimely passing from drug-induced cardiac arrest at 60) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019), and she’s done a lot outside of the sci-fi franchise since then.
Read on to learn all about Billie Lourd’s career and see the lovely words she’s shared about her famous mom.
How ‘Star Wars’ shaped Billie Lourd’s early career
Billie Lourd was born to Carrie Fisher and celebrity talent agent Bryan Lourd in 1992. Fisher and Lourd broke up in 1994 after he came out as gay and left her for a man, and Billie would be Fisher’s only child.
Like many famous parents, Fisher and Lourd originally hoped that Billie wouldn’t follow them into the entertainment industry, but as Billie recalled in a Time magazine essay, “I went to school planning to throw music festivals, but always had this little sliver of me that wanted to do what my parents pushed me so hard not to do—act. I was embarrassed to admit I was even slightly interested. So when my mom called me and told me they wanted me to come in to audition for Star Wars, I pretended it wasn’t a big deal—I even laughed at the concept—but inside I couldn’t think of anything that would make me happier.”
In her essay, Lourd wrote that as a child, she struggled with the idea of her mom being Princess Leia and it wasn’t until years later, when she attended Comic-Con with her mom, that “I realized then that Leia is more than just a character. She’s a feeling. She is strength. She is grace. She is wit. She is femininity at its finest. She knows what she wants, and she gets it. She doesn’t need anyone to defend her, because she defends herself. And no one could have played her like my mother. Princess Leia is Carrie Fisher. Carrie Fisher is Princess Leia. The two go hand in hand.” By joining the world of Star Wars for her very first project—and even rocking the double-bun hairstyle her mom made famous as Leia, Lourd “decided to embrace the weird galactic nepotism of it all,” as she amusingly put it, but she’d soon prove her talents beyond that.
Billie Lourd’s post ‘Star Wars’ work: Campy TV hits, movies and more
In 2015, the year she made her Star Wars debut, Lourd was cast in the Ryan Murphy horror-comedy Scream Queens, playing a sorority girl who wears earmuffs in a wink at the Princess Leia hairstyle. After the show ended in 2016, she continued to work with Murphy, and was in the cast of his anthology series American Horror Story, where she played a cult member, a witch and other dark characters from 2017 to 2024. Later this year, she’ll be returning to the campy horror world in a new role for the show’s 13th season, and she’ll also be working with Murphy yet again in his anthology series Monster, playing the sister of axe murderer Lizzie Borden.
Outside of being a regular in Murphy’s over-the-top world, Lourd appeared in a 2020 episode of the Will & Grace reboot, playing the granddaughter of the character played by her real-life grandma, Debbie Reynolds, during the show’s original run. She’s also acted in films like Booksmart (2019), Ticket to Paradise (2022) and The Last Showgirl (2024). Most recently, she voiced a character in the 2025 Smurfs movie, costarred in the indie comedy Adulthood and appeared opposite the Jonas Brothers in A Very Jonas Christmas Movie.
Lourd currently has a number of films in the pipeline, including Love Language, a rom-com, and Artificial, a dark comedy about the AI industry.
Navigating grief and honoring a sci-fi legend: ‘I’ve had to learn to allow myself to feel all the things’
Billie Lourd, now 33, is married to Austen Rydell, an actor and the producer of her upcoming film The Pirate King, and they have a son, Kingston, and a daughter, Jackson. Lourd has always spoken openly about her mother and grandmother’s impact, and since becoming a mother herself, she’s shared her family’s legacy with her kids, saying that when she showed them Return of the Jedi, “They were just so enthralled. I sat behind them and cried while they watched it.” She continued, “For me to get to have those things and to get to show them my mom in those movies is so special.”
The pain of losing Fisher was compounded by the fact that Reynolds died just one day after her. Losing your mother and grandmother within a day of one another would be an incredibly painful experience for anyone, and Lourd had the added burden of grieving in the spotlight. On social media, she’s posted loving tributes to her family, and in 2021, she shared a video of herself singing Fleetwood Mac’s ballad “Landslide,” with a caption that used the lyrics to poignantly meditate on loss, writing, “We loved to sing. We loved Fleetwood Mac. We loved this song. It echoed in our living room throughout my childhood, playing slightly too loudly as she scribbled her marvelous manic musings on yellow legal pads. I didn’t know who to be or what to do after my mom died. I was afraid of changing because I had built my life around her. Then she was gone. And I had to rebuild my life without her. And it wasn’t (and still isn’t) easy. But time has made me bolder. I never stop missing her but I have gotten stronger with each passing year. And if you’re going through something similar, time will make you bolder too.”
On what would’ve been Fisher’s 69th birthday this past year, Lourd shared a vulnerable post on Instagram, writing, “I’ve had to learn to allow myself to feel all the things—mad at her for not getting sober but also sad for her that she wasn’t able to get sober but also happy that she existed at all.” A couple months later, in commemoration of the 9th anniversary of Fisher’s death, Lourd posted about the joy she feels being with her children and seeing her dad be a grandpa, all while paying tribute to her mom, writing, “This joy wouldn’t be possible without my mom. This joy only exists because she existed. So even though she is not physically part of this joy, she is part of the reason for it. Even though she is not alive she lives on through this joy.”
Lourd has been honest about the challenges that come with grieving a mother who was a public figure, and refuses to sugarcoat the fact that Fisher battled personal demons, but she also shares happy memories and keeps her mom’s humor and strength at the forefront. Almost 50 years after she changed the face of pop culture forever, Princess Leia’s influence endures, and as Lourd shared in her Time essay after Fisher’s passing, “I grew up with three parents: a mom, a dad and Princess Leia. Initially, Princess Leia was kind of like my stepmom. Now she’s my guardian angel. And I’m her keeper.” Judging by what she’s shared about her mom—and the powerful film and TV roles she’s taken on herself—it’s clear that Lourd is doing a great job of keeping Fisher’s legacy alive.
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