The fan service was strong with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. And to please Reylo fans, the redeemed Ben Solo, formerly Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), got his reverse Uno Snow White moment when Rey (Daisy Ridley) kissed him before he died. Ultimately, the kiss didn’t really please anyone—no matter if they were rooting for or against the Rey-Kylo pairing—but Ridley herself feels that it was well-earned.
Recently on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Collider), Ridley discussed the scene, explaining it was a part of the reshoots for the film—and that it felt true to her feelings of saying farewell to the role. “I felt like we all… it felt earned, and what was interesting [was the] intentionality. My feeling in that moment was that it was a goodbye, so that felt earned. Because, I mean, you could call a kiss a thousand things, but I felt like it was a goodbye, and that whole scene felt so emotional. I felt like I was saying goodbye to the job.” At least it was a goodbye kiss in a series where folks can easily come back from the dead; I hope Kylo Ren the clone isn’t in the works as part of Ridley’s return as Rey in Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Star Wars movie.
Ridley continued to explain how the patchwork scenes from Rise of Skywalker came together, and how emotional the experience was for her. “Actually we had to pick up something that was missed,” she said. “So my very, very, very last day, we were doing various pickups and stuff, I had to literally sit and look, and the camera was coming away from me, and—I guess I was looking at him–J.J. [Abrams] was like ‘you good?’ and I immediately started crying my eyes out, because it really felt like goodbye.”
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