Watch Gold Leader Deploy an F-Bomb in Unseen Footage From Original ‘Star Wars’
For a franchise about slightly sketchy space crooks and intergalactic military types, the Star Wars films are almost conspicuously free of profanity. It makes sense from a business perspective — keeping the series PG-13 ensures that it’ll be open to a wider array of viewers — and yet the absence of cussing feels especially noticeable in a movie starring the famously coarse-tongued Carrie Fisher. The closest the series came to a four-letter word was Han Solo getting dissed as a “scruffy nerf-herder,” but a recently discovered cache of lost footage from the original Star Wars is going to change all that in short order.
The Hollywood Reporter was on the scene at Star Wars Celebration Orlando last weekend, and they gave a special report from a panel run by Industrial Light and Magic executive John Knoll in which he unveiled some long-lost footage from the 1977 film. In one clip, the operative codenamed Gold Leader gives some orders and then uses a (NSFW) syllable seldom heard around the Lucasfilm universe:
In another scene, Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin (late greats Fisher and Peter Cushing) exchange some heated words after he gives the order for her home planet of Alderaan to be incinerated by the Death Star. Leia takes the news about as well as could be expected of someone learning that all she has ever known and love will be reduced to so much space dust:
To those who have permanently imprinted every line and frame of Star Wars into their memory, the unearthing of new footage would be like finding a couple lost pages of the Bible. Superfans, feel free to dunk on all who have not yet seen this footage with your advanced knowledge that the Star Wars universe does indeed include the F-word.