We’ve been speculating about Supreme Leader Snoke in The Last Jedi for some time now. Indeed, our resident Star Wars expert Brandon Rhea has been regularly updating a feature called Who is Supreme Leader Snoke? which is filled with intriguing theories (and is now updated with spoilers from The Last Jedi).
We still don’t have an answer to that question, but we do have new information about the villainous character, from Entertainment Weekly, and from an interview that FANDOM recently conducted with the actor playing Snoke, Andy Serkis. So the following is everything we know about the Supreme Leader thus far. Just BEWARE OF POTENTIAL SPOILERS AHEAD…
We’ll See Snoke in the Flesh in The Last Jedi
When FANDOM recently sat down with Andy Serkis, the actor said, “Snoke’s an awesome character. In this [movie] we get to see him in the flesh more, rather than just being a 25-foot hologram.”
Instead, the character audiences will encounter is 9-feet-tall, and apparently wrapped in shimmering gold thanks to his fondness for the finer things in life. And we’ll witness his strange physicality.
“His body is kind of twisted up like a corkscrew,” Serkis told EW. “So he has limited movement. His aggression and his anger is contained and restricted by that physicality.”
Snoke’s facial deformities are inspired by the injuries troops sustained in the trenches during WWI. “His jaw is completely mangled and the left side of his face is mauled,” Serkis continued. “So I had a way of taping down the left-hand side of my mouth to restrict lip movement on that side.”
Snoke is a Master Manipulator
When we spoke to Serkis, he explained, “There’s a real darkness to the character… he’s very deeply wounded… and sort of manipulative and aggressive because of that.”
EW’s quotes back that up, with Serkis saying, “The thing about Snoke is that he is extremely strong with the Force, the dark side of the Force. He’s terribly powerful of course. But he is also a very vulnerable and wounded character.
“He has suffered and he has suffered injury. The way that his malevolence comes out is in reaction to that. His hatred of the Resistance is fuelled by what’s happened to him personally.”
That malevolence can be seen in the way that Snoke treated Kylo Ren and General Hux in The Force Awakens. And sounds like it’s only going to get worse in The Last Jedi.
“His training of Kylo Ren is not yielding what he wants,” Serkis told EW. “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.”
Snoke’s Origin May Remain a Mystery
The above video was created by Star Wars Explained.
In the aforementioned Who is Supreme Leader Snoke? feature, we wrote about the character potentially being Darth Plagueis, Gallius Rax, an ancient Sith Emperor, or a new power from beyond the galaxy. But it sounds like that question might not be answered in The Last Jedi.
“Similar to with Rey’s parentage, Snoke is here to serve a function in the story,” writer-director Rian Johnson told EW. Meaning the film might not spoon-feed us all the information.
He continued, “In the original trilogy, we didn’t know anything about the Emperor except exactly what we needed to know, which is what Luke knew about him; that he’s the evil guy behind Vader.
“Then, in the prequels, you knew everything about Palpatine because his rise to power was the story. [In The Last Jedi] we’ll learn exactly as much about Snoke as we need to.”
The Last Jedi hits UK screens on December 14 and US screens on December 15.