Star Wars: Rian Johnson Explains Why He Didn’t Share Snoke’s Backstory in ‘The Last Jedi’

For the last two years, some fans have been investigating every clue about Supreme Leader Snoke in hopes of discovering the identity of the villain who debuted in The Force Awakens. With The Last Jedi, audiences learned how irrelevant that information was, thanks to the script by Rian Johnson. Rather than an intentional avoidance of the character’s origins, Johnson recently shared that he merely found no opening in his story to interject this information.

“In this particular story, it’s much more like the original trilogy, where with Snoke if you think about the actual scenes, if suddenly I had paused one of the scenes to give a 30-second monologue about who he was, it would have kind of stopped the scene in its tracks, I realized,” Johnson told the audience during a BAFTA Q&A. “Even though it could have been interesting, something that fans were interested in, as storytellers, we have to kind of serve what the scenes need to be.”

In the weeks since the film has been released, some fans’ biggest problem with the story was that we weren’t given answers about this character, despite how little audiences knew about Emperor Palpatine when the original Star Wars trilogy debuted.

“It was a tough thing, even though I knew some fans were interested in it I also knew it wasn’t something that dramatically had a place in this movie,” Johnson shared.

Despite Johnson not including the Supreme Leader’s backstory in his film, he didn’t rule out the possibility that a future story, possibly even future film, could delve into the character’s history and how he became such a powerful figure in the galaxy.

“Hopefully it can be addressed elsewhere or even [Episode IX director] J.J. [Abrams] may address it in the next movie,” Johnson teased. “But it’s not something that’s particularly interesting to Rey, so we kind of had to follow through.”

Far more important than Snoke’s backstory, however, is what the character meant to Kylo Ren. Much like audiences only knew Palpatine was Vader’s master, we only needed to know Kylo considered Snoke his master. Some audiences may demand to have every mystery explained to them, yet nothing about Snoke’s history will change the events of The Force Awakens nor The Last Jedi and impact anything related to the Skywalker Saga.

The Last Jedi is in theaters now.

[H/T Walt Disney Studios]