Andy Serkis says THE FORCE AWAKENS' Snoke is not you-know-who!

POTENTIAL SPOILER WARNING! DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE YET!

ALSO IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE MOVIE YET OF YOUR OWN VOLITION, THEN I DON’T THINK THAT WE CAN BE FRIENDS ANY LONGER!

Talk about bringing balance to the Force. Yesterday we got a fantastic new fan theory for Star Wars: The Force Awakens about Rey’s mysterious background, and today we have one of the other best theories out there being totally shot down.

In my coverage of all your Force Awakens questions I mentioned the mystery of Supreme Leader Snoke, the giant hologram leader of the First Order who seems to have lured Ben Solo aka Kylo Ren to the Dark Side and is currently pulling all the strings in the shadows. Besides for his name, his injured looking visage and his penchant for dwarfing his subordinates, we really know nothing about him. So of course everybody wants to.

One theory was that Snoke was actually Darth Plagueis, Emperor Palpatine’s own Sith master mentioned Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. In there we learn that Darth Plagueis was so powerful in the Dark Side of the Force that he had the power over life and death, but after teaching Palpatine all he knew, his ambitious apprentice poisoned him in his sleep, killing him. The theory states that maybe Plagueis didn’t actually die like Palpatine thought, but survived – injured – in the shadows this entire time. The physical descriptions of Plagueis and Snoke certainly seemed to match up, and to add further validity to the theory, composer John William’s music them for Snoke is almost identical to the piece of music he composed for the very scene where Palpatine tells Anakin about Plagueis. All the puzzle pieces certainly appeared to line up.

Except that it’s all hogwash. At least that’s according to Andy Serkis, and he should know as he was the one actually playing Snoke using motion capture. EW recently unveiled the first official images of Snoke – as well as Lupita Nyong’o’s Maz Kanata – and took the time to ask Serkis about it and it seems that “he actually turns out to be … just Snoke.”

Huh. Well, that’s an anticlimax. EW reiterated what Serkis had previously told them though about the character:

“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful. Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”

The actor did also mention though that there was some extreme secrecy around the character, and even he was kept in the dark about it.

“It’s the first time I’ve been on set not yet knowing what the character’s gonna look like. I mean, talk about secrecy!”

“When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance.”

So in other word, Snoke may not be Darth Plagueis but he could definitely (maybe kinda I hope) still turn out to be more than “just Snoke”? Damn it, Episode VIII – which starts shooting next month – seriously needs to get here quicker.

Last Updated: January 6, 2016