After a stinging defeat by the scavenger Rey, Kylo Ren refocuses his sinister efforts on destroying the Resistance. But even though he is growing more powerful in the dark side of the Force, Kylo Ren still has much to prove to his shadowy mentor, Supreme Leader Snoke.
For Adam Driver, his return to play Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi delivered an unexpected fan moment. As he explains, “There are times in the shooting of it that as much as you try to deny that you’re making a Star Wars movie, it inevitably seeps in. You see a TIE fighter, and it’s hard to ignore that it’s a TIE fighter. The biggest moment for me when I realized I was doing a Star Wars movie, even though we already did one, was Mark Hamill. It was just surreal to see him. For me, on the outside, growing up with those movies, it’s not lost on me how unique it is because I’ve attached so much meaning to those movies that have nothing to do with him. But to suddenly be in a film with him was very surreal. He is just cool. There’s not a more elegant way to say it.”
Driver was impressed with how writer/director Rian Johnson developed Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi. “How Rian moved the story along for my character, I thought, was really unexpected,” Driver says. “That’s very generic, but that’s the truth. The fact that Kylo Ren kills his father at the end of The Force Awakens was not a psychology that Rian skipped over in the sense of how that affects someone. And in a way, it grounded it more in reality. You can’t deny that the event happened, so he didn’t skip over it and actually made the circumstances of it real. For me, that was helpful.”
Offering some insight into Kylo Ren’s nature, Driver says, “Kylo Ren is someone who’s becoming more entrenched in his ideas, almost to a religious fervor, and is so certain that he’s doing the right thing. Something about the youthfulness of him was not lost in Rian’s writing.”
He adds, “I don’t know that he ever comes to terms with the relationship of the light and dark within him. I think it’s still always an internal battle. That’s the thing that Rian understands in his characters—that people are never all one thing, even though we’d like them to be. There’s a lot of grey in the world and especially within ourselves. That’s an interesting thing that I find fun about playing that character. He’s never all one thing.”
As to Kylo Ren’s relationship with Rey in The Last Jedi, Driver comments,
“They’re both very different. Mark’s a talker and Adam isn’t. Mark has lived a crazy life. A lot of his life has been influenced by Star Wars, and he’s so well-known for it. He’s older; he’s a father, so his energy is steadier.
Adam is incredible. He has this amazing depth of emotion. I don’t know anyone else like him. He’s amazing to work with. He’s very generous.”
— Daisy Ridley elaborates on how “great” it was working with both Mark Hamill and Adam Driver on The Last Jedi.
“How Rian moved the story along for my character, I thought, was really unexpected. That’s very generic, but that’s the truth. The fact that Kylo Ren kills his father at the end of The Force Awakens was not a psychology that Rian skipped over in the sense of how that affects someone. And in a way, it grounded it more in reality. You can’t deny that the event happened, so he didn’t skip over it and actually made the circumstances of it real. For me, that was helpful.”
“Kylo Ren is someone who’s becoming more entrenched in his ideas, almost to a religious fervor, and is so certain that he’s doing the right thing. Something about the youthfulness of him was not lost in Rian’s writing.”
— Adam Driver on Rian Johnson’s script for The Last Jedi
“In the first Star Wars films, Darth Vader was a great villain, but he was never someone that you identified with. You identified with Luke’s relationship to him. So Vader was the monster. He was the scary father, and then he was the father you had to reconcile with. Whereas with Kylo, it’s almost like Rey and Kylo are two halves of the protagonist. Rey is the light, and Kylo is the dark.
And with Kylo, again, this is all about the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Kylo is that anger of adolescence, and wanting to reject your parents, and wanting to break away, which, to some extent, all of us can identify with as much as we can identify with the hopeful Rey looking up at the stars from her planet.”
“From his point of view, it’s a very naked, open, emotional appeal. It’s his version of ‘I’m just a girl standing in front of a guy asking [him out].’ It’s Kylo’s sick, evil version of that but from his perspective, the same way that when tells his version of the story with Luke, I don’t think he’s lying. That’s his experience of that moment, and I think he’s telling it honestly.”
— Rian Johnson on Kylo Ren’s appeal of ‘Join me’ to Rey in The Last Jedi
“In all the epic drama that’s going on, at the center of it are these two people who are on opposite sides but divided by something that’s a very thin line—the dark and light that exists in both of them. They’re not far off from each other, and in a way they’re together in this journey, where maybe they both feel alone. They’re almost each other’s opposite in a great way.”
— Adam Driver on Kylo Ren’s relationship with Rey in The Last Jedi
“Daisy is an extraordinary young actor. She brought a depth and emotion to the character that I could not have imagined. I discovered that so much that people respond to in the character of Rey comes from Daisy: her tenacity, her bravery, her humor, her depth, so many things that make little kids want to be Rey, those things are Daisy.”
— Rian Johnson praising Daisy Ridley’s performance in The Last Jedi
Reylo Source 