Yeah, Andy Serkis didn't really know who Snoke was while filming Star Wars, either

Serkis was, admittedly, a bit more diplomatic about it, calling the Supreme Leader “the one character that was a massive challenge,” on account of him constantly “evolving, in terms of writing, as we were going along.” Which certainly seems like a nice way of saying that nobody involved had a handle on who the character was meant to be, right up until he got chopped in half halfway through The Last Jedi. (Also a surprise to Serkis, as it happens, who describes reading the film’s script in a vault somewhere, thinking, “Oh, this is getting really good!’ and then “Oh, right, you’ve just been cut in half, bye-bye.”)

The whole thing honestly sounds like kind of a pain in the ass, even for a performer whose career was largely built on the ability to be the best in the world at being the guy on set in the form-fitting suit with all the dots glued to his head. Serkis notes that he spent all of The Force Awakens as a hologram, without actually knowing who his character was supposed to be, and even in The Last Jedi—where, he says, he got some handle on his character—he was still stuck up on a big-ass throne, miles away from scene partners Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver. All of which feels kind of symptomatic of the sequel trilogy, which, even at its best, often carried the fingerprints of a movie trilogy written piecemeal, and without any clear ending in mind. (J.J. Abrams’ The Rise Of Skywalker did eventually strongly imply that Snoke was some kind of genetically engineered puppet of Emperor Palpatine, who returned, somehow.)

Elsewhere in the interview, Serkis says basically nothing about his upcoming Lord Of The Rings film The Hunt For Gollum, which he’s both starring in and directing, and noted that, as far as he’s concerned, his other Star Wars character, Andor‘s Kino Loy, is still alive out there somewhere, happily drunk on the Empire’s dime.