‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’: Was Kylo Ren Honest About Rey’s Parentage?

A bombshell was dropped in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” about Rey’s (Daisy Ridley) true parentage by Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). But was it really the truth?

“Do you know the truth about your parents? Or have you always known? You’ve just hidden it away. Say it,” Kylo urged.

As she fought back tears, Rey responded: “They were nobody.”

“They were filthy junk traders,” Kylo affirmed. “Sold you off for drinking money. They’re dead in a pauper’s grave in the Jakku desert. You come from nothing. You’re nothing. But not to me.”

When Entertainment Weekly asked director Rian Johnson about this powerful scene, the filmmaker said that J.J. Abrams and “Argo” Oscar-winner Chris Terrio are currently plotting the next movie.

“I can’t speak to what they’re going to do. And there’s always, in these movies, a question of ‘a certain point of view,’” Johnson said. “But for me, in that moment, Kylo believes it’s the truth. I don’t think he’s purely playing chess. I think that’s what he saw when they touched fingers and that’s what he believes. And when he tells her that in that moment, she believes it.”

When Johnson inherited the movie, he said that there was no established origin for Rey, so he was free to do whatever he liked. He recalled the heart-wrenching scene shared by Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Darth Vader (James Earl Joyce) when the latter confessed, “Luke, I am your father.” And he decided to flip it for Rey.

“I think back to the ‘I am your father’ moment with Vader and Luke, and the reason I think that lands is not because it’s a surprise or a twist but because it’s the hardest thing Luke and thus the audience could hear at that moment,” he explained. “It turns someone into a bad guy that you just hate and want to kill into suddenly, Oh my God, this is a part of our protagonist. We have to start thinking of this person in more complex terms. We need to start thinking in terms of a redemption arc.”

“If Rey in this movie, if someone had told her yes, here’s the answer. You are so and so’s daughter. Here’s your place in this world. Here you go. That would be the easiest thing she and the audience could hear. It would hand her on a silver platter her place in all this,” Johnson also told Slash Film.

But Johnson does not want Rey to relax in front of the enemy, and he wanted her to find her own strength and stand on her own two feet. It was definitely hard to acknowledge that her parents were nobodies, but in fighting that fact, Rey was fighting Kylo as well.

“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is now showing in cinemas nationwide.