Was Matt Smith going to play Young Palpatine in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker?

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was a famously messy movie. The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams came on board after Rian Johnson directed the previous Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi, and set about writing a script that reversed or half-reversed a lot of the decisions made in that film. “I’ve never rewritten a film as much as this one,” co-screenwriter Chris Terrio said at the time. “We’re course-correcting as we go — we’re trying things, and some things don’t work and some things aren’t ambitious enough. Some things are overly ambitious. Some things are too dense. Some things are too simple. Some things are too nostalgic. Some things are too out-of-left-field. We’re finding our balance.”

That means a lot of ideas got left on the cutting room floor, including a role for Doctor Who veteran Matt Smith. “We were close to being in it, but it never quite happened,” Smith recently said on MTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. “I think the thing they were thinking of before…eventually, the part became obsolete and they didn’t need it. So, I never got to be in Star Wars.”

So now we know that Smith was at one point going to be in The Rise of Skywalker, although his involvement never moved past “a couple of meetings to talk about it.” The next question is: who was he going to play?

Fans are convinced Matt Smith was going to play Young Palpatine in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Horowitz asked whether Smith was going to play the son of Emperor Palpatine, who famously turned up in The Rise of Skywalker as the main villain after seemingly dying way back in Return of the Jedi. That would also make Smith’s character the father of Rey (Daisy Ridley). (In a Star Wars novelization, Palpatine’s “son” was revealed to a non-identical clone, but close enough.)

Naturally, Smith didn’t confirm anything, although he did drop some tasty hints:

"I could not possibly say, but it was a pretty groovy thing. It was a really groovy part and concept. It was a big thing, a big story detail. A transformative Star Wars story detail. But it never quite got over the line … It was a big shift in the history of the franchise."

Whoever Smith was supposed to play, the internet picked up and ran with the Young Palpatine idea. And who knows? Maybe Disney can incorporate this notion whenever they decide the world needs another Star Wars trilogy. “Maybe I can come back,” Smith mused. “[Y]ou never know…”

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