10 Famous Movie Scenes The Actors Almost Ruined

Even though they look all exciting when they’re finished, shooting a movie can be quite mundane - for the actors, at least. The working days are long and there’s a lot of sitting around just waiting, with a very small amount of actual acting to be done.

And so, to let off some steam while midway through shooting The Empire Strikes Back, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher attended a party hosted by comedian Eric Idle, a decision that almost badly affected a pivotal scene in the film.

Ford and Fisher went on an all-night bender, getting insanely drunk thanks to something that Idle called “The Tunisian Death Drink.” If they had the next day off, then this wouldn’t have been a problem, but they were due on set early in the morning, scheduled to shoot the scene where their characters arrive in Cloud City - and they were still drunk while filming this sequence, as Fisher revealed to The Daily Beast:

“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. 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.”

If you watch the scene with this knowledge in mind, you can almost tell that something isn’t quite right with their performances, but thankfully, it’s hardly enough of a distraction to full-on ruin it.