Tag: supreme leader snoke

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The Force Awakens roundup: Speculating on the Rey-Kylo connection

kylo-finn-reyI don’t generally link to speculation, but ComicBook’s Lucas Siegel has an interesting theory on Rey and Kylo Ren. I buy them as siblings, but I don’t like the theory that the two are actual twins. Just look at the actors – the age difference between Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver is far too obvious. But Siegel’s theory is more about the idea of their roles mirroring each other. (Look at the costuming if nothing else.) Even if he does bring up The Clone Wars’ bizarro Mortis arc.

→ Empire is out in the U.K. (I’m not sure about the U.S., given that I’m avoiding retailers like the plague at the moment) and there are a few new bits bits of information that didn’t (shocker) make Empire’s own perfunctory online coverage, including that Snoke was “was critical in the seduction of [Kylo?] Ren to the dark side.” Fair warning that this is via Star Wars News Net, aka the former Star Wars 7 News, but it’s almost all quotes with little interpretation. (Avoid the comments, though.)

→ A new Disney Channel featurette that focuses on Rey, as well as giving us a few glimpses of new scenes.

→ Afraid of spoilers? There’s a Chrome extension that can help you. Good luck with that. (Here’s the closest thing I have to a spoiler policy.)

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The Force Awakens: How tall is a Snoke?

snokeAndy Serkis talks to Empire about filming his scenes as Supreme Leader Snoke… Who is supreme in any number of ways. Namely, he is tall.

“It was quite an unusual situation,” Serkis tells us in the new issue of Empire. “I worked specifically with Domhnall Gleeson and with Adam Driver. My first day was basically standing on a 25-foot podium doing Lord Snoke without the faintest idea what he looked like… or in fact who he was! I was very high up, totally on my own, away from everybody else, but acting with them.”

Echoing his comments to Entertainment Weekly, Serkis also calls the character “severely damaged.”

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Serkis on Snoke: “It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like.”

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Andy Serkis didn’t know what Supreme Leader Snoke looked like at first, either, he tells Entertainment Weekly. “It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean talk about secrecy!” And his look was changing throughout filming of The Force Awakens:

“When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance,” Serkis says.

He’s too “tall” and “extreme” for prosthetics, Serkis says. “Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure.”

As for the character:

“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful,” Serkis says. “Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”

He’s not anyone we’ve already met, either. (It’s been a bad week for Darth Plagueis-based rumors.)

“No, he’s a new character in this universe. It is very much a newly-introduced character,” Serkis says. “He’s aware of what’s gone on, in the respect that he has been around and is aware of prior events. I think it’d be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.”

Serkis also says that he and Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata “are the only two performance-capture characters in an otherwise very analog world.”

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The Force Awakens: Kylo Ren isn’t a Sith, and the origins of the First Order

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Empire Magazine continues to dribble out information from their cover story on The Force Awakens. J.J. Abrams confirms the subtext that Kylo Ren is not a Sith, and that he serves Supreme Leader Snoke, “who is a powerful figure on the dark side of the Force.” (So likely also not a Sith.)

The most interesting part, however, is contextualizing the origins of the First Order:

“That all came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again?’” Abrams reveals. “What could be born of that? Could The First Order exist as a group that actually admired The Empire? Could the work of The Empire be seen as unfulfilled? And could Vader be a martyr? Could there be a need to see through what didn’t get done?”

The issue is supposedly on newsstands Thursday.

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J.J. Abrams: Simon Pegg “was an honest, critical friend” on The Force Awakens

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Entertainment Weekly dropped their last 3 Fall Movie Preview stories today. First up, the reveal of Simon Pegg’s role… Sort of. It’s not so much who he’s playing (“he won’t be recognizable,” J.J. Abrams says) but what he was doing behind the scenes.

“He was a sounding board,” Abrams says. “He would drop by the set because he wanted to, and when he could, he would help… We could talk about things, and he was a perfect combination of incredibly smart screenwriter, fan of the series, critical fan of the series, and friend of mine – but not just blindly supportive. He was an honest, critical friend. And he wasn’t so close to it that he became immune to things. He would come in with fresh eyes and very smart ideas. He’s one of a handful of people along the way that has been really priceless.”

→ EW asks who the film’s “Ralph McQuarrie” is. Abrams points not only to the actual Ralph McQuarrie and his work for the original trilogy, but production designer Rick Carter.

→ Abrams adresses the fandom, keeping secrets, Ben Burtt, Andy Serkis and fear. He confirms that some of the things they’ve already put out are red herrings.

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The Force Awakens: Interviewing Annie Leibovitz, revealing Andy Serkis’ role

snokeStarWars.com has an interview with Annie Leibovitz today about her Star Wars work for Vanity Fair. There’s a photo of Andy Serkis in mo-cap gear, and the reveal that his character is Supreme Leader Snoke.

Snoke! Granted, it’s no Sheev, but aren’t we glad I didn’t do the Twitter roundup last night?

→ The first actual The Force Awakens action figures have been spotted – on eBay, naturally. It’s a stormtrooper.

→ Spoiler corner: Finn and his hot new accessory.