When Kylo Ren wears his mask in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he’s supposed to be an intimidating figure, but you (I) can’t help but think, “Aw, that’s Adam Driver under there. The guy who goes ‘uh oh!’ in the Inside Llewyn Davis song.” Kylo is a fascinating, complex character — his scenes with Rey are the highlight of The Last Jedi, a very good movie (even if the Russian trolls want us to believe otherwise) — but unlike his idol, Darth Vader, he’s not very scary.
What if this was your first impression of Kylo, though?
That artwork, of what Kylo Ren almost looked like, was posted online by Lucasfilm concept artist Christian Alzmann, who wrote, “Very early Jedi Killer/Kylo concept. Wasn’t used in Star Wars: The Force Awakens but ended up being the inspiration for the Fifth Brother in Star Wars Rebels.” (Here’s more on Fifth Brother, an Inquisitor who was dispatched by Darth Vader to hunt down Jedis.) Imagine if this is what Kylo Ren looked like in Force Awakens, and subsequently Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker — that shirtless scene would have played very differently. Instead, the Lucasfilm team, including director J.J. Abrams and costume designer Michael Kaplan, went with a more subdued look.
“J.J. kept saying he’ll know when he sees it and one day we were having a discussion and he was talking about wanting it to be something that a child would remember, you know, that would be indelible in a child’s mind, and one of my concept artists came up with that image,” Kaplan said about Kylo’s creation. “I don’t know where he got it but he heard something that a child would like, and I don’t know if it was the kind of spaghetti type lines on it or what, but the next time J.J. came by that was what we presented to him and he loved it.”
The Rise of Skywalker, not starring a grey-skinned Driver, opens December 20.
(Via Instagram)