“Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”
Terrio and Abrams were also able to build on the special relationship between Rey and Kylo Ren that’s brought to thrilling life in “The Last Jedi.” In Johnson’s film, the two are so deeply linked that they can communicate from great distances. There’s plenty more of that in “The Rise of Skywalker.”
“That was a great gift of ‘The Last Jedi,’ in that their relationship seems very intimate and specific,” Terrio said. “There’s a way in which, in ‘The Last Jedi,’ Rey and Kylo Ren interact, and they just seem like they’re part of the same whole, that spiritually, they’re really one person. That really helped us in thinking about Rey and Kylo Ren, which is to say that we wanted to elaborate on the idea that Snoke bridged their minds in ‘The Last Jedi.’ But what we wanted to say is that there’s something deeper there, and leave it to debate about at which point they became this dyad in the Force, where they were really two, or were they one, whether that was a mistake that Palpatine made by bridging them and therefore creating this thing. But regardless, their relationship is extremely interesting and complicated, and it was one of the things that J.J. and I loved about ‘The Last Jedi’ that we luckily inherited and could build.”
At certain points in the film, Rey and Kylo Ren are able to actually take objects from the other one’s side, an idea Johnson put forth in “The Last Jedi.” Abrams and Terrio loved that concept, and use it late in the film to allow Rey to pass a lightsaber to a returned-to-the-Light Kylo Ren (AKA Ben Solo) during a key battle.
“That was another gift from Rian!” he said. “In ‘The Last Jedi,’ [their Force connection] in the rain, the rain has crossed from one place to another. We thought, we’re going to try to really push that to the point where these two heirs to the empire, that they’re bonded by the force, but they’re not going to be bonded on the Dark Side, which is what Kylo Ren thinks at the beginning of the film — that they’re going to be bonded on the Light. That is the thing that Palpatine never really could’ve anticipated, that they would come together on the Light and that the galaxy would not be afraid and would follow Rey into the heart of darkness. But that saber pass, that was the thing that we were dying to do, because first of all, to see Ben Solo holding a Skywalker saber was a really important thing for us, but second, to say that this connection that the two of them have is going to be the thing that saves the galaxy was super-important.”
