Adam Driver says Kylo Ren’s Star Wars arc wasn’t what he signed up for

“I had an overall arc in mind that [Abrams] wanted to do, which, you know, then changed.” Driver explained. “But his idea was that—almost the opposite journey of Vader, where Vader starts the most confident and the most committed to the dark side. And then by the last movie, he’s the most vulnerable and weak. He wanted to start at the opposite, where this character was the most confused and vulnerable, and by the end of the three movies would be the most committed to the dark side. So I tried to keep that arc in mind, regardless if that wound up not being the journey anyway, because it changed, obviously, as we were shooting. But I was still focused on that.”

As to where the original vision started to slip, “With Rian [Johnson], he took it in a different direction, but it still tracked with the character,” Driver recalled. “And then the last one, it changed into being, you know, about them and the dyad, and things like that. And kind of evolving into Ben Solo. That was never a part of it. … He was Ben Solo from the beginning, but it was never a version where we’d see Ben Solo when I first signed up for it.”

Listen, sometimes, stories change and evolve while they’re being written. But it’s always been a puzzle as to why Lucasfilm’s plan for the trilogy was to have Abrams kick things off and then hand the reins over entirely to two completely different filmmakers (Johnson had creative control over The Last Jedi, and Colin Trevorrow was meant to conclude the series with his own script called Duel Of The Fates before being replaced by Abrams). That approach is not the most intuitive way to create a cohesive narrative vision. Nevertheless, we got the Star Wars that we got, and Driver obviously did the best he could to adhere to the integrity of Kylo Ren’s arc—whatever it turned into along the way.