Adam Driver is done with Kylo Ren. Asked on The Rich Eisen Show whether he would ever play the character again, Driver didn’t leave much room: “Yeah, it’s over… No more ‘Star Wars.'”
He said he and Steven Soderbergh “tried to do one more,” but Disney’s answer came back as “No, he’s dead.” It’s a blunt reply for the fans who have spent the past year campaigning for that standalone Ben Solo movie.
The Movie That Almost Happened
Driver first went public with the project last year, saying he and Soderbergh pitched a Kylo Ren film that Lucasfilm liked and Disney’s leadership turned down. “We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea,” he said at the time. “We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman, and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”
That last line is the whole problem. Ben Solo dies at the end of The Rise of Skywalker, and the pitch, titled The Hunt for Ben Solo, needed a way around that. Driver told Eisen the group worked on it “for a few years, really and earnestly,” with Soderbergh set to direct and a script from Scott Burns, Rebecca Blunt, Soderbergh and Driver himself.
“It was awesome. It was really cool,” he said. “But you know, I don’t get to decide.”
Could Fans Still Change Anything?
Eisen pushed on whether Driver would come back if someone revived the project. He didn’t shut the door completely, but he didn’t sound hopeful either. “If they wanted to, fine. But we’re not… It’s not our call,” he said. “I think the ship has sailed though.”
He did have kind words for the fans who rallied after the film was dropped, calling the response “pretty incredible.” After the news broke, a group of fans paid for a plane to tow a “Save The Hunt for Ben Solo” banner over Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. “I didn’t expect that it was going to be billboards and people flying planes over Disney and things like that,” Driver said. “That was pretty cool.”
Soderbergh has sounded just as resigned. In April he said the film “would have happened” if it was going to happen, and Driver’s latest comments line up with that.
Where Star Wars Goes From Here
For anyone hoping to see the Skywalker-era villain on screen again, this is about as final as it gets short of a Lucasfilm statement. The studio’s film slate has moved to new stories instead, including Shawn Levy’s Star Wars: Starfighter, which does not involve Driver.
Driver played Kylo Ren across The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. If his word holds, that trilogy is the full run.
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