James Blunt Says 'Pressure' To Be 'Thin' Contributed To Carrie Fisher's Death
James Blunt is shedding new light on what his close friend Carrie Fisher was going through right before her 2016 death.
The British “You’re Beautiful” singer spoke about the “Star Wars” alum — who he refers to as his “American mother” in his bio on his official website — during a recent appearance at the Hay Festival in Wales while promoting his memoir, “Loosely Based on a Made-Up Story,” the Independent reports.
According to the outlet, Blunt told the audience that Fisher was pushed to drastically change her appearance after she was asked to reprise her iconic role of Princess Leia in a new trilogy of “Star Wars” films.
Fisher was set to play the character again in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” which was released after her death in 2017.
“I was with her the day before she died, when she came down to my house,” Blunt told the audience, per the Independent. “And she’d been really mistreating her body.”
“So she was really on a high and a positive, but they had applied a lot of pressure on her to be thin. She spoke about the difficulties that women have in the industry, how men are allowed to grow old, and women are certainly not.”
“She really put a lot of pressure on herself, started using drugs again and by the time she got on the plane, she had effectively killed herself,” Blunt went on. “They say it was heart failure of some kind, but she had taken enough drugs to have a really good party.”
In 2016, Fisher was flying from London to Los Angeles when she went into cardiac arrest on the plane. She died days later, and a toxicology report found she had cocaine, heroin, MDMA and methadone in her system. The report did not state a definitive cause of death, but the actor and author had been open about her struggles with substance abuse for years.
Fisher was also very open about the pressure she faced to lose 35 lbs. ahead of 2015′s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
“They don’t want to hire all of me — only about three-quarters!” Fisher told Good Housekeeping UK in 2015.
“Nothing changes, it’s an appearance-driven thing. I’m in a business where the only thing that matters is weight and appearance,” she said. “That is so messed up. They might as well say get younger, because that’s how easy it is.”
HuffPost reached out to “Force Awakens” director J.J. Abrams and “Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson for comment, as well as to “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and his company Lucasfilm, but did not get an immediate response.
According to Blunt’s website, he and Fisher struck up an unlikely friendship in the early 2000s when they met at a party. Blunt even stayed at Fisher’s Los Angeles home with her late mother, Debbie Reynolds, while he recorded his first album.
Blunt also admitted in his recent memoir that he did drugs with Fisher, despite knowing she had substance abuse issues.
“Charlie, her best friend, confronted her more directly and told her she needed to quit drugs,” he recalls in his book. “I took a different approach and did them with her, pretending to myself that I would guide her to redemption one day — just not today. As a result, her — daughter Billie [Lourd] blames me in part for her death, and no longer speaks to me.”
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