Disney’s Star Wars Sequel Trilogy started strong but ended badly, with the promising elements of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi squashed under a leaden, confusing plot that simply didn’t make much sense. That’s not to say there weren’t things worthy of praise across the movies though, with the most obvious example being Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren. Here was a Dark Side Force user like nothing we’d seen before, powered by rage, nursing an inferiority complex and grappling with his conflicted feelings for Rey.
The Rise of Skywalker showed him (eventually) redeeming himself and turning to the Light Side, taking down the Knights of Ren and assisting Rey in fighting the implausibly resurrected Emperor Palpatine. Despite this arc though, we never got a full explanation of why and how Ben Solo turned to the Dark Side, other than him seeing Luke in a moment of weakness.
Now, The Magicians author Lev Grossman has revealed a little more about how Adam Driver imagined his backstory. Grossman wrote the first major reveal piece on The Rise of Skywalker in Vanity Fair, spending time on set chatting about the film with the cast. And according to him, Driver thought that Kylo Ren’s early years were pretty miserable and that Han and Leia were crappy parents.
“Both Han Solo and Leia were way too self-absorbed and into this idea of themselves as heroes to really be attentive parents in the way a young and tender Kylo Ren really needed. … There wasn’t really that much of it in the movie, so I just think we have to assume his childhood sucked.”
It’s a gloomy take on the characters, but sadly feels pretty accurate based on what we know about Han and Leia after Return of the Jedi. Han was feeling very tied down without being able to roam the galaxy, apparently taking long official trips and staying away from home. Meanwhile, Leia was trying to run the New Republic, meaning she was attempting to balance a career and motherhood. So, when Snoke rocked up and actually gave Ben Solo some paternal attention, it was all too easy for him to seduce the young Padawan to the Dark Side.
Much of this is contained in The Rise of Kylo Ren comic, though it still feels like a shame we didn’t get to see key parts of Ren’s story on the big screen in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.
