The “coke nail” theory goes like this: in a quick shot of Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi, Carrie Fisher’s fingernail looks suspiciously long, and fans decided it was a cocaine nail hiding in plain sight. Fisher herself shut it down on October 10, 2012, tweeting, “I never used my fingernail for drugs. I used dollars or tiny spoons like any other respectable former drug addict,” and linking to the io9 story.
The reading took off after Reddit user ScottDS posted the still on r/movies on September 24, 2012, calling it Carrie Fisher’s “coke nail.” On September 28, io9 described Leia as “sporting a suspiciously long fingernail,” and BuzzFeed credited ScottDS while pointing to another image showing a similarly long nail.
A coke nail is slang for a deliberately long fingernail, usually the pinky, used to scoop powdered cocaine.
What gave the theory legs: Fisher had been open about using on set. In October 2010, while promoting Wishful Drinking in Australia, she said, “We did cocaine on the set of Empire, in the ice planet,” and that she “didn’t even like coke that much” but took “whatever train I needed to take to get high.”
Fisher’s on-set admission concerned The Empire Strikes Back, and she directly rejected the Return of the Jedi nail theory when it spread.
An Easter egg is an intentionally hidden detail, and the 2012 write-ups didn’t describe the nail that way. There’s no reliable crew explanation establishing it as intentional or drug-related.
Fisher, who played Leia opposite Harrison Ford’s Han Solo, died on December 27, 2016, at age 60.