Star Wars: Ian McDiarmid Has Hilarious Answer to Question of Whether the Emperor Had Sex

Did you ever hear the tale of Darth Sidious’ love life? It’s not a story the Star Wars movies would tell you. Decades after Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) died aboard the second Death Star in 1983’s Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker saw the shadowy Darth Sidious return as a husk of the Sith Lord who wielded unlimited power in 2005’s Revenge of the Sith. The Emperor, kept alive by machines and his Sith acolytes on the planet Exegol, had somehow returned, with little in the way of explanation besides this callback to Sith: “The dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be…. unnatural.”

What was explained, however, was Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) lineage. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), grandson of Darth Vader, revealed to Rey that she’s the Emperor’s granddaughter and a Palpatine: her father, Dathan (Billy Howle), was the Emperor’s son. But the question then became: Did the Emperor do the deed and reproduce naturally?

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“There was never any discussion of any of that. It was up to me to work it out in my head,” McDiarmid told Variety when asked about how Palpatine had a son in an interview for the 20th anniversary of Revenge of the Sith. “There was talk in The Phantom Menace about something called midi-chlorians, which were involved somehow in Anakin’s birth. George [Lucas] didn’t want to go too deeply into that. But we reckoned it was kind of virgin birth, though one ought not to say that because God knows you get all sorts of complications.”

“Then people ask the slightly embarrassing question about, ‘Does this evil monster ever have sex?’” McDiarmid continued. “And we don’t really know the answer to that question either — things in tubes, you think about probably, rather than the awful vision that you might have in your head of this monster ever having a sexual relationship with anybody.”

Paternity of the Clones: How the Emperor’s Son Was Made

In 1999’s The Phantom Menace, Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) speculated that Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) was conceived by the midi-chlorians: microscopic lifeforms that reside within all living cells and communicate with the Force. While Rise of Skywalker didn’t answer whether the Emperor had sex, the 2021 guide The Secrets of the Sith stated that Dathan wasn’t birthed by midi-chlorians or natural means of reproduction.

Instead, Dathan was what is referred to as a strandcast, an artificial genetic construct that isn’t a direct clone replicate of the donor — think the Clone troopers produced from Jango Fett’s genetic template — but rather modified clone bodies created from an engineered template. The Strand-casting process was used to create the Emperor’s Snoke clones as well as Dathan, who ultimately proved not to be a viable candidate for the Sith Lord’s dark essence following Palpatine’s physical death in Return of the Jedi.

Unlike Palpatine’s “son,” Rey was born to Dathan and Miramir (Jodi Comer) through natural means. And unlike her father, Rey possessed midi-chlorians and was powerful in the Force, which is why Palpatine wanted to take over her body in The Rise of Skywalker.