Billie Lourd is staying strong. The 24-year-old Scream Queens star’s uncle Todd Fisher told Entertainment Tonight that his niece is doing the best she can following the deaths of her mother, Carrie Fisher, and grandmother Debbie Reynolds within a day of each other this past December.
“She’s dealing with two gigantic losses,” Todd told ET’s Nancy O’Dell. “These two girls — my girls, my mother and my sister, were big, big personalities [with a] big influence on Billie, myself, many people. … There’s a vacuum in the room and she’s feeling it and we’re all feeling it. It’s just that I’m 59 and I have no choice but to step up and put this stuff forward,” he added of his sister’s daughter. “I’m letting [Billie] breathe, you know? She needs to breathe. She needs to step back from all of this loss.”
As previously reported, Fisher and Reynolds died one day apart from each other. The Star Wars actress passed away at the age of 60 after suffering a heart attack while aboard a flight from London to LAX. Her mother, Reynolds, died one day later after suffering a stroke in Los Angeles. She was 84.
“When I was standing in the room the day after my sister died and we’re in the hospital and my mother was dying, I mean, I was more heartbroken watching my niece than I was for myself,” Todd recalled to ET of the horrific two days. “It was heart-wrenching. The idea that somebody would have to deal with that kind of a loss back to back, moment to moment — I mean we’d just had this horrible loss and then here you are just a handful of hours later standing in a different hospital in a different room. It was astounding.”
Lourd, whose dad is CAA agent Bryan Lourd, is handling the trauma as well as she can, Fisher added, praising his niece for being a perfect blend of his sister and mom.
“She’s also genetically Carrie and Debbie,” Todd continued, while also praising her father. “I don’t want to leave Bryan Lourd out of this. He’s an awesome father and if it wasn’t for him right now, we would be in a much tougher position. He has supported her beautifully. [But] you take those genes, and I think you’ve created a pretty powerful gal … She is a lot more like my mother even than Carrie,” he concluded. “You know, she’s a little like Carrie but she’s a lot like my mother, which means she’s going to be another Molly Brown.”
