Carrie Fisher Was Responsible For Taking Indiana Jones' Virginity (Sort Of)
Carrie Fisher took the virginity of Indiana Jones. At least, that's how she told it while she was alive. Specifically, that's what she told me. In her own words: "I wrote it with George [Lucas.] We wrote Indiana Jones losing his virginity to Mata Hari. It went very well."
I had been asking about her work on the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy, so this answer came a bit out of left field. However, it's a little-known fact that Fisher worked as a writer on many George Lucas projects, doing an uncredited polish on the scripts for the prequels and even coming up with adventures for Indiana Jones to go on in his TV series, "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles."
So, how did Indiana Jones actually lose his virginity, and what part did Fisher play?
Bigger than life
"She was a bigger-than-life character and she was always there for George to call," longtime Lucasfilm producer Rick McCallum told me in a 2021 interview for Star Wars Insider magazine. I also asked him to help set the stage a little better to understand exactly how Carrie Fisher took Indiana Jones's virginity.
"The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" documented the early life of everyone's favorite archeologist, from his time traveling the world with his parents as a child to his pre-college days getting into trouble with all manner of famous individuals. In the episode titled "Paris, October 1916," Indiana Jones is caught in the intrigue of World War I and meets Mata Hari.
"Nicolas Roeg actually directed the Mata Hari episode," McCallum remembered, "and we had this wonderful Dutch actress who was gonna play Mata Hari. Absolutely fantastic woman. She was a friend of Linda Hamilton's and she went to go visit her in California. And she started working out with Linda who was prepping 'Terminator 2.' We had met her before she went to California, and then about six months later, she came back to Europe and we met her, and she was transformed into this person that had nothing to do with Mata Hari. I had to recast it very quickly. We were always on the back leg of it, plus we were shooting in Prague and it was the coldest winter. It was minus 30, 35 degrees. And remember this is just after the Velvet Revolution. We were the first Western film to be in Prague. Nothing quite worked, but the locations were absolutely fantastic, so it was a really tough shoot. But Carrie came in and helped us with the new actress."
Fisher was there on set to help coach the actor tasked with wooing the young Indiana (Sean Patrick Flannery). The actor in question was Domiziana Giordano, an Italian star and artist likely most known to American audiences for her role in 1994's "Interview With a Vampire."
Young Indiana Jones
In the episode, a 16-year-old Indiana Jones — posing as an 18-year-old in the French Foreign Legion named Henry Defense — is on leave in Paris when he has a run-in with Mata Hari. He falls for her hard (despite him being underage) and has very little idea about her spy activities until later. The episode involves quite a bit of jealousy as well, as Indiana struggles with seeing her get close to other men in the story.
"Star Wars" fans will recognize other faces in this episode, particularly Ian McDiarmid. He famously played the scheming Darth Sidious/Emperor Palpatine in several "Star Wars" films (depending on your reckoning), but here he portrays the affable Professor Levi. The behind-the-camera crew also shared a lot of DNA with "Star Wars". The cinematography was done by David Tattersall, who lensed all three of the prequels, and the production design was handled by Gavin Bocquet (who was responsible for the production design on the prequels as well, giving them their physical look).
Nicholas Roeg, the director, is also of keen interest. Fans might recognize his name as the director of the seminal films "Walkabout" or "The Man Who Fell to Earth." He also directed the 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl's "The Witches" with Anjelica Huston.
Lucas really did assemble movie-quality teams for "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" and they deserve a lot more attention than they get.
Always there for him
When I spoke to Fisher personally in 2015, she painted a very rosy picture of her relationship with Lucas. Going back further to older interviews, however, there was definitely some creative clashing on "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." In 1994's "Star Wars Insider" #23, Fisher told the interviewer the experience was, "really, really annoying, but it was very, very funny. Screaming at each other. Arguing big time about love scenes. We couldn't disagree more, in any world, about love scenes. I mean hours of it, hours of 'Why wouldn't you say that? I talk like that,' he said to me. I don't believe it! And if he does [talk like that], they let him get away with it because he's Lucas."
Eventually, she conceded that Lucas got what he wanted, but wasn't exactly happy about it: "He won. He let me win in the draft, then he went off and shot it and he changed it. I went crazy!" In addition to being paid for her work on the episode, Fisher remembered, "[George] gave me a lamp. It was a really nice lamp."
The prequels happened, naturally, after this experience with "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles." But that didn't seem to damage their relationship in any meaningful way. Rick McCallum told me that, "[Carrie] gave George ideas on all of the prequels. She was always there for him."
Emphasis on "always."
To the end
"The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," along with the rest of the theatrical "Indiana Jones" saga, can be found on Disney+ with a subscription to the service. If you want to watch this particular episode, look for "Demons of Deception," which marries a story about Indy's adventures during World War I in the Verdun, which was written by Jonathan Hensleigh (the writer behind "Die Hard With a Vengeance" and "Armageddon," among other films).
These episodes were pieced together chronologically for the show's 1999 release on VHS and the streaming version retains those edits. When these episodes originally aired, however, they were wildly out of order.
As for Fisher, she passed away on December 27, 2016. At the time of her death, she had completed her work on 2017's "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," leaving Lucasfilm to scramble to reconfigure the ninth installment of the Skywalker Saga. Her relationship with "The Last Jedi" writer/director Rian Johnson sounds similar to that of her relationship with Lucas. In a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair, Johnson said, "I would sit down with her and she would just give me [...] After an hour, I would have filled up pages and pages writing down the notes and one-liners that she would pitch," he said. "And so we tried to work them in whenever we could."
To her last days, she was helping work on Lucasfilm stories.