Once you start down the Star Wars path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Okay, I’m paraphrasing Yoda here, of course, but those words do ring true. Here we are some ten months past The Rise of Skywalker hitting theaters…. And sequel trilogy star Daisy Ridley is still talking Star Wars. She shocked some late last month when she revealed that she had trouble finding work in the wake of Episode IX. This time she tells us that her character wasn’t always going to be a Palpatine. In fact, she could very well have been Rey Kenobi.
Ridley sat down with Jimmy Kimmel Live guest host Josh Gad recently and talked about her character of Rey. In one of the earliest iterations of the “nobody” from Jakku, Rey was neither going to be nobody, nor a Palpatine:
At the beginning they were toying with an Obi-Wan connection, and then there were different versions. And then it really went to that she was no one.”
Should we have had a Rey Kenobi?
We all know now that Rey ended up being not a Kenobi, but rather the descendent of the Emperor Sheev Palpatine. (Although, she wasn’t really his granddaughter in fact; Rey was the daughter of a failed Palpatine clone.) Ridley’s comments regarding her character and the possibility of a Rey Kenobi do highlight one of the biggest issues fans had with the sequel trilogy. Namely, Lucasfilm had no cohesive plan for the trilogy as a whole…. Or for Ridley’s character individually, apparently.
Perhaps in hindsight, if Rey were to be somebody, Rey Kenobi would have been the better choice. Pop culture has long been rife with clichéd characters trying to deny their less-than-noble heritage. Ridley’s Rey, ultimately and unfortunately, fell into the that category.
In J. J. Abrams’ defense, however, he had his work cut out for him in The Last Jedi’s aftermath. Finishing the story he started in The Force Awakens after Rian Johnson’s arguably significant departure from Star Wars norm was work enough. I don’t blame him for taking the easy, Palpatine path.
What about you? Would you have wanted to have seen Rey Kenobi as opposed to Palpatine? Let us know!
Source: Jimmy Kimmel Live
