J.J. Abrams Says It Would Have Been "Very Weird" Not To Bring Palpatine Back For THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

Star Wars fans were shocked when the first trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker dropped to reveal that Emperor Palpatine would return for the final chapter of the Skywalker saga. At the same time, some fans were a little confused because nothing has been included in the previous two films that would build up to Palpatine. They are just going to throw the character in there.

We’re not really sure how exactly he will come into play, but I hope that whatever they end up doing, it makes sense! During a recent interview with Uproxx, Abrams talked about the inclusion of Palpatine and explains that it would have been “very weird” if Palpatine wasn’t in the film:

“Well, when you look at this as nine chapters of a story, perhaps the weirder thing would be if Palpatine didn’t return. You just look at what he talks about, who he is, how important he is, what the story is — strangely, his absence entirely from the third trilogy would be conspicuous. It would be very weird.”

When director Colin Trevorrow was developing the film, Palpatine was not part of the story. That was a character added by Abrams when he took over. The director went on to explain that coming back to the franchise gave him the opportunity to repurpose early ideas that came from the creative process on The Force Awakens:

“That’s not to say there was a bible and we knew what happens at every step. But when Larry Kasdan and I worked on The Force Awakens, we didn’t do it in a vacuum. We very purposely looked at what came before. We chose to tell a story that touches upon specific things and themes and ideas that we’ve seen before, to begin a new story. But we examined all that came before to ask where does this feel like it’s going?

“So there were discussions about that at the time. Yet, like any beginning, you want to put the threads in, but you don’t want to necessarily be literal about everything. And then when Rian was brought on to do The Last Jedi, we met and we talked about things and he wrote his story. And when I read it the script, I realized this didn’t get in the way of anything Larry and I talked about that I thought I’d get to. There were some very specific things we did get to do in this movie that we were laughing and going, “Oh my god, we’re finally doing that thing we talked about five years ago.”

Bring it on Abrams! I’m excited to see what you’ve created for us and I hope that it makes us all happy.