It’s no secret that the creative direction of the Star Wars sequel trilogy was as haphazard as a Stormtrooper’s aim, and there’s few better examples of that than the character arc of Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, which the actor has just revealed evolved into something completely different from what he signed up for.
While doing the press rounds for Michael Mann’s Ferrari, Driver was answering questions on The Rich Eisen Show about his time in a galaxy far, far away (jump to 5.26 in the video) when he revealed that his reaction to being offered the role of Kylo Ren wasn’t an immediate yes, because he was a fan of Star Wars and “didn’t want it to be bad”.
When he eventually agreed to play the role in 2015’s The Force Awakens, the Kylo Ren outlined by director J.J. Abrams wasn’t destined to have had the redemptive arc seen at the end of 2019’s divisive trilogy-capper, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Driver said “J.J. Abrams walked me through what he wanted to do with the character, but you had to sign up and be like, ‘I’m gonna do it,’ and once I did that, I went to London to star for pre-production, and it’s like, ‘there’s a tiny room down the hall, you can go in there and read the script.’ And so I was reading it for the first time.”
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When asked about how he felt about playing Vader 2.0, Driver responded “I had an overall arc that in mind that [Abrams] wanted to do. His idea was that [Kylo’s] journey was the opposite journey of Vader, where Vader starts the most confident and the most committed to the dark side. And then by the last movie, he’s the most vulnerable and weak. He wanted to start with the opposite. This character was the most confused and vulnerable, and by the end of the three movies, he would be the most committed to the dark side. I tried to keep that arc in mind, regardless if that wound up not being the journey anyway, because it changed while shooting. But I was still focused on that.”
Driver admits that Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi took the character of Kylo in a different direction, but that it tracked with the arc he’d kept in his mind, but by the time the last film came around it had completely changed.
“The last one, it changed into being, you know, about them and the dyad, and things like that, and evolving into Ben Solo. That was never a part of it. He was Ben Solo from the beginning, but there was never a version where we’d see Ben Solo when I first signed up for it.”
You can listen to the full interview here, in which Driver also discusses the comedy of a Star Wars set, and the burden of being the character who kills Harrison Ford’s iconic Han Solo.
