As the world continues to mourn the death of actress and writer Carrie Fisher, her longtime friend and co-star Mark Hamill has penned a touching tribute to Fisher in a column in the Hollywood Reporter. Hamill offered up memories of his Star Wars co-star, including their first meeting when Fisher was 19 and Hamill was 24. “I was just bowled over,” Hamill wrote. “I mean she was just so instantly ingratiating and funny and outspoken. She had a way of just being so brutally candid. I’d just met her but it was like talking to a person you’d known for 10 years.”
Fisher and Hamill worked together as recently as this year, having reunited for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and again on Star Wars: Episode VIII, which Fisher had finished filming for before she died. “I’m grateful that we stayed friends and got to have this second act with the new movies,” wrote Hamill of his on-screen twin. “We ran the gamut over the years, where we were in love with each other, where we hated each other’s guts […] We went through it all. It’s like we were a family.”
Hamill’s tribute comes as part of an outpouring of remembrances and support from celebrities over the past week. Fisher’s half-sister Joely also paid tribute to “[her] Princess Leia” in a guest column, while Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd publicly addressed the deaths of her mother and grandmother Debbie Reynolds, who died of a stroke just one day after her daughter’s death, in an Instagram post.
According to Fisher’s brother Todd, Fisher and Reynolds will have a joint private funeral and be buried together, though no date has been set. The relationship between mother and daughter is the subject of an upcoming HBO documentary; the two were also neighbors in Beverly Hills. The film has been pushed up and will debut on Jan. 7 in light of the pair’s deaths.
