If you ever watched The Empire Strikes Back and thought that Han Solo and Princess Leia seemed a little spaced out when they first arrived in Cloud City, it’s not just because they had spent time occupying the stomach of a giant asteroid-dwelling space worm only a few scenes prior.
Allow us to explain.
In a 2015 interview with The Daily Beast, Carrie Fisher (RIP) reminisced about a late night party she’d had with the Rolling Stones at Monty Python member Eric Idle’s house during the filming of 1980’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Harrison Ford was also in attendance and according to Fisher, they both drank so much of something called a “Tunisian Death Drink” that they were still drunk into next day’s shoot.
Lucasfilm“We had an early call, and Eric called down and said, ‘The Rolling Stones are here!’ and I came down and it was all of them,” Fisher said. “I called Harrison and said, ‘Get over here! This is ridiculous!’ I wonder how he remembers it. I remember that we never went to sleep, so we weren’t hungover — we were still drunk when we arrived in Cloud City the next day. We don’t really smile a lot in the movie, but there we’re smiling.”