Entertainment Weekly actually shed some light on Supreme Leader Snoke with Andy Serkis and director Rian Johnson. They’re not promising answers, exactly, but there’s plenty to unpack here about his motivations and what he wants with the First Order and Kylo Ren.
“His training of Kylo Ren is not yielding what he wants,” Serkis says. “Therefore his anger towards Kylo Ren is intensified because he can’t bear weakness in others. Part of the manipulation is goading him with Hux and playing them off against each other.”
They’re not promising all the answers on Snoke – Johnson compares him to the Emperor in the original trilogy and says “a story is not a Wikipedia page,” but there’s a lot more here than I expected. And sometimes? A bare outline is enough.