Much to the surprise of, well, everyone,
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker brought back the villainous Emperor Palpatine. It was shocking because there hadn't been so much as a single hint about his return before that first trailer was released, and writer Chris Terrio has now addressed how that came about.
During an interview with
Awards Daily, Terrio explained that Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy and Senior Vice-President of Live Action Development and Production Michelle Rejwan had
"clear plans about certain narrative marks they wanted us to hit," but Supreme Leader Snoke's demise in
The Last Jedi is what ultimately led to Emperor Palpatine being brought back.
"[Redeeming Ben Solo] gets tricky at the end of Episode VIII because Snoke is gone," he explains.
"The biggest bad guy in the galaxy at that moment seemingly is Kylo Ren. There needed to be an antagonist that the good guys could be fighting, and that’s when we really tried to laser in on who had been the great source of evil behind all of this for so long."
"The source of the evil in the galaxy is this dark spirit waiting for its revenge and biding its time. The entity known as Palpatine in this version – his body died in Return of the Jedi – is patient and has been waiting." What's interesting about these remarks is that Terrio is essentially confirming that the Emperor in this movie was, as some fans suggested, a corpse possessed by Palpatine's spirit.
Well, that or he was indeed a clone! Either way, the Palpatine we knew did die in
Return of the Jedi.
Interestingly,
Star Wars News has revealed that they initially heard from sources that Matt Smith was indeed cast as a version of Palpatine before J.J. Abrams scrapped the idea and brought back Ian McDiarmid. That presumably means
The Rise of Skywalker once included more flashbacks or an Emperor who was restored to his youth.
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