A little-known fact about Star Wars is that after writing the first script for Star Wars, George Lucas changed the character of Luke Skywalker from being a male character to being female in the second version of thescript in 1975. To visualize this change, Ralph McQuarrie created versions of concepts that featured Luke as a young woman with a blond bobbed hairstyle while HanSolo donned a beard and a cape.
This idea was short-lived, however, as Lucas still struggled to realize the final concept of his film. Luke reappears in the third draft of the script as a young man. Wanting to still include a female character in the film, Lucas decided to make the duo a trio instead and added a third character—Princess Leia. “It was at that moment,” Lucas recalled inJ.W. Rinzler’s 2007 book, The Making of Star Wars, “that I came up with the idea that Luke and the princess are twins. I simply divided the character in two.”
And the rest is history.