Adam Driver Revealed What Was Supposed To Happen To Kylo Ren's Character, And It's So Much Better Than What We Got
Adam Driver reveals J.J. Abrams' original plan for Kylo Ren was "changed while shooting." The character was not going to find redemption by evolving into Ben Solo.
“J.J.'s idea was that [Kylo’s] journey was the opposite journey of Vader, where Vader starts the most confident and the most committed to the dark side and then by the last movie he’s the most vulnerable and weak. He wanted [Kylo] to start with the opposite. This character was the most confused and vulnerable, and by the end of the three movies, he would be the most committed to the dark side."
The Star Wars sequels. They were so close to greatness. Everything was in place. They had a great young cast. They were also bringing back the old cast to usher in a new era. J.J. Abrams was attached to direct, and then, for some reason, they decided to make a $1 billion trilogy with no fucking plan of where the story was going to go. I don't think "The Last Jedi" and "The Rise of Skywalker" are the worst Star Wars movies by any means, but they are the ones that probably had the most potential. The prequels are bad at many points, and the first two films of that trilogy aren't good, but they are consistent with their direction. They know where they want to go, unlike the Helter-skelter nonsense we got with the sequel trilogy.
Adam Driver is legitimately one of my favorite actors. I thought he was sensational as Kylo Ren. It was wonderful casting, and even though I wasn't crazy about his character arc, he was the most consistent character in the sequel trilogy. His redemption ultimately felt pretty predictable, but it wasn't horribly executed. Now that we're several years removed from Star Wars, Driver is starting to tell the truth about where he originally expected his character to go. 
The people at Disney have a superpower. They can take every interesting thing about Star Wars and make it uninteresting. Kylo Ren becoming one of the scariest villains in the universe? No, turn him into a Simp. Remember Boba Fett, a character that was cool for five minutes 40 years ago? Let's make a boring ass show about him. Even "The Mandalorian," which gave us some of the best Star Wars ever, couldn't sustain itself after a great first two seasons.
I would be okay with too much Star Wars if the tentpole movies that we got actually lived up to the hype. It is mind-blowing to me that nobody at Disney thought it was a good idea to go into this trilogy with some idea of where they wanted things to go. People can complain and bitch about Marvel all they want, but Kevin Feige had a plan for where the Infinity Saga was going to end up. Yes, they made changes along the way. That would inevitably happen over 11 years of filmmaking, but they understood where they wanted the narrative to go. Star Wars did not, and it burned me inside.
We are four years removed from "The Rise of Skywalker," which means at some point in the next several years, we'll get a lot of revisionist history and long-form Internet videos of people saying the Star Wars sequel trilogy was secretly genius. And I'll have to sit back and facepalm as these people make incoherent points.
If you love Star Wars, you love Star Wars. They could throw shit on a screen, and you'd still enjoy it. That's fine; there are certain things I'm like that about, too. The Detroit Tigers could go 0-162, and I'd still be there every Opening Day. But instead of trying to convince us that these things are of quality, just acknowledge that you like them for what they are. If these movies were well-made and cohesive, the actors involved wouldn't hate talking about Star Wars years later. Harrison Ford isn't the only one that's tired of it.