Star Wars: J.J. Abrams Teases the Knights of Ren Will Remain Masked Throughout The Rise of Skywalker

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is bringing back the Knights of Ren. The mysterious Force-followers, of whom Kylo Ren is the leader, first appeared in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. They were all but ignored in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, giving J.J. Abrams, who directed The Force Awakens, the opportunity to reveal more about the group in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. In an interview with Esquire, Abrams says he’s excited to be able to show more about who the Knights of Ren are, but that fans shouldn’t expect to get to know the Knights of Ren on a personal level.

“They’re characters that, when we came up with them in Force Awakens and had very brief sighting of them, it was something that we had a lot of ideas of sort of further adventures with them, backstory, you know, and all sorts of things that were not the focus of the central story, and never made it into the movie,” Abrams says. “And Episode VIII, The Last Jedi, didn’t address that, at all, and it just allowed for us to bring them back in. I mean, they’re best kept more mysterious than familiar, which is just to say there aren’t going to be a lot of scenes with them taking their masks off and hanging out and eating sandwiches, but it felt like I definitely wanted to see more of them than we had, and I felt happy that we got a chance to do that in this movie.”

What we know about the Knights of Ren is that they follow the dark side of the Force and that they’ve existed for decades. They operate outside of the First Order command structure, though Kylo Ren trained under Supreme Leader Snoke, the First Order’s head of state, during the years after the fall of the Galactic Empire. Kylo Ren’s assassination of Snoke and ascension to head of the First Order could change the relationship between the two groups, though how remains to be seen.

Kylo led the Knights of Ren to destroy Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi Temple sometime after Kylo himself — then Ben Solo — abandoned his training there. The Knights of Ren burned the temple to the ground and slaughtered all of Luke’s students but the ones who chose to leave with them. During the events of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, both Kylo Ren and Snoke became obsessed with locating Luke, who had gone into self-imposed exile, and Rey, a powerful Force-user who saw a vision of the Knight’s of Ren’s attack on the Jedi Temple.

What role do you think the Knights of Ren will play in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker? Let us know in the comments. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens in theaters on December 20th.