“Star Wars” actor Ian McDiarmid recently revealed in a new interview that Emperor Palpatine might not have been a clone in “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” — at least not entirely.
What’s going on?
- According to reports earlier this week, the new “Rise of Skywalker” novelization revealed that Emperor Palpatine, who seemed to return from the dead, was actually a clone and not a resurrected body.
- But McDiarmid said at Comic Con Brussels that there was a line in the original “Rise of Skywalker” clip that explained the situation a little bit more, Inverse reports.
- McDiarmid said: “Well, of course, there were all sorts of explanations for why I might return. I think I can reveal something. At one point, the script had the line in that first scene with Adam (Driver) where he says ‘You’re a clone’ and I said in that original script, which is no longer with us, ‘More than a clone, less than a man,’ which seemed to me to sum it up because we knew that the camera has already snaked past the clone tank in which there are various versions of Snoke that you probably noticed.”
What did the ‘Rise of Skywalker’ novel say?
- Screenrant reports that the “Rise of Skywalker” novel featured a passage that revealed Palpatine was a clone.
“All the vials were of empty liquid save one, which was nearly depleted. Kylo peered closer. He’d seen this apparatus before, too, when he’d studied the Clone Wars as a boy. The liquid flowing into the living nightmare before him was fighting a losing battle to sustain the Emperor’s putrid flesh.
“What could you give me?” Kylo asked. Emperor Palpatine lived, after a fashion, and Kylo could feel in his very bones that the clone body sheltered the Emperor’s actual spirit. It was an imperfect vessel, though, unable to contain his immense power. It couldn’t last much longer.”
So what’s the deal?
- It seems like the film’s writers and producers aren’t exactly on the same page, or at least there were several ideas about what happened with Palpatine. At the end of the day, none of this was revealed in the actual film, which means there are probably millions of fans who are still confused over what happened to Palpatine.