Obi-Wan Kenobi Writer Reveals Reva’s Death Scene

“You’re not serving him. You’re hunting him,” Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) realizes of Reva the Third Sister (Moses Ingram), the Inquisitor hunting down the Jedi for Darth Vader (Hayden Christensen) in Obi-Wan Kenobi. The Star Wars series reveals Reva was a Jedi youngling who survived Order 66 after Anakin Skywalker, the newly risen Sith Lord Darth Vader, attacked the Jedi Temple and slaughtered her friends ten years earlier in Revenge of the Sith. Seeking revenge, Reva served under Vader for a time as his Grand Inquisitor, and was twice left for dead before attacking the young Luke Skywalker (Grant Feely) hidden away on the Lars farm on Tatooine.

“Justice,” Reva answered when asked why she wanted to kill the son of Anakin Skywalker. But Reva couldn’t bring herself to avenge her friends, telling Obi-Wan, “I failed them. He killed them all, and I couldn’t do it.” Instead of becoming what she hated most, Obi-Wan told her, Reva chose not to become Vader.  

Reva’s redemption played out differently in the original scripts by Stuart Beattie, who developed Obi-Wan Kenobi as a theatrical film trilogy set between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. 

In an interview with The Direct, Beattie revealed Reva was fated to die by Vader’s blade after she’s saved by Obi-Wan, who would have revealed Vader’s secret identity as Anakin Skywalker. (As scripted in “Part II,” Obi-Wan learns from Reva that his former padawan survived their fateful lightsaber duel a decade earlier on Mustafar.) 

“We were always faced with the fact that Obi-Wan could never kill Darth Vader. So he needed to defeat someone,” Beattie explained. “And so Reva was my attempt to give [Obi-Wan] someone to defeat or someone to save, because he’s not going to save Darth. The Darth Vader storyline is going to end in a downer, so I wanted to save someone, and that’s why I created Reva.”

In Beattie’s version, Reva didn’t know Anakin Skywalker was christened Darth Vader by his Sith master Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid). It was Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight, who “killed her friends, put the scar on her, almost killed her, [and] left her for dead,” spurring Reva’s hatred of Obi-Wan and the Jedi. 

“I figured, ‘How would she know that this thing in a mechanical suit that everyone calls Darth Vader is the guy who killed her, or tried to kill her?’ So, it was Obi-Wan kind of letting her in on that secret and that revelation that makes her kind of go, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been wrong this whole time,’” Beattie said. “And so she goes and basically saved Kenobi by sacrificing herself, telling Vader, ‘I killed Kenobi.’ And then Vader killed her, [with her] knowing that Vader would kill her.”

Beattie continued, “That kind of completed her arc. So just a little bit different that she was, yeah, absolutely, the Inquisitor hunting Kenobi all the way through and driven by her own personal demons.”

Starring Ewan McGregor, Moses Ingram, Rupert Friend, Joel Edgerton, Bonnie Piesse, Indira Varma, Sung Kang, Grant Feely as young Luke Skywalker, Vivien Lyra Blair as young Leia Organa, and Hayden Christensen as Darth Vader, all six episodes of Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi are now streaming on Disney+.