Andy Serkis Talks About The Mysterious Supreme Leader Snoke From STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS

Along with the tons of new Star Wars: The Force Awakens info we covered this morning, actor Andy Serkis has finally spoken about his mysterious character, Supreme Leader Snoke. We know he's a shadowy figure who's in charge of The First Order, but information about his character has been extremely hard to come by over the past few months. In a new interview with EW, Serkis offered up some details about the look of the character, as well as how he's "vulnerable" yet "powerful":

“It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean, talk about secrecy! When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance.”

“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful. Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”

That part about him suffering "a lot of damage" makes me wonder. Possible spoilers here, I guess, but I remember hearing speculation in the early days of this film that maybe the Emperor somehow survived at the end of Return of the Jedi, and if that's the case, I wonder if Snoke is a cybernetic or reformed version of that same man, calling the shots from the shadows. When asked if the character's wounds came from the original trilogy's clash between the Rebellion and the Empire, Serkis hesitated before responding:

“No, he’s a new character in this universe. It is very much a newly-introduced character,” Serkis says. “He’s aware of what’s gone on, in the respect that he has been around and is aware of prior events. I think it’d be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.”

He's aware of the past to a great degree? Is that because he was physically there for a lot of the main events depicted in the original trilogy? I know he says he's a new character, but if I wanted to put on a conspiracy theorist hat for a second, maybe that's only a new character in name only, or a new persona he's adopted even though he's really the same guy as before. Something to consider, anyway. That hesitation could be more important than we know.

As for whether or not he could have played the character using practical make-up, Serkis says there's no way it would have worked:

“No, no,” the actor says. “The scale of him, for instance, is one reason. He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design – you couldn’t have gotten there with prosthetics. It’s too extreme. Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure. You could never have done it [in real life.]”

Well, color me intrigued. Hopefully we'll find out the truth on the night of December 17th when Star Wars: The Force Awakens debuts in theaters.