Palpatine

• 1. Introduction

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  Sheev Palpatine is the main antagonist of the Star Wars franchise, a character so carefully constructed that his first name did not appear on screen until decades after his debut. He first appeared in the 1980 film The Empire Strikes Back, yet audiences had to wait until the 2014 novel Tarkin to learn that his given name was Sheev. That gap between mask and face is the core of who Palpatine is: a man of layered identities, known to the public as a senator, then a chancellor, then an emperor, and known to a secret few as Darth Sidious, the Sith Lord pulling every string.

  What makes him so durable as a villain is not brute menace but patience. George Lucas described his maneuverings as those of a dejarik grandmaster moving pieces on a board. He plotted a war, then used it to seize emergency powers, then converted a republic into a dictatorship while the Senate applauded. The questions that hang over his story are not who wins the lightsaber duel, but how a democracy hands itself over willingly, and whether evil, once defeated, ever truly dies.

• 2. Lucas's Political Blueprint

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  George Lucas rooted Palpatine in real history, naming Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alberto Fujimori, Ferdinand Marcos Sr., and Adolf Hitler as direct inspirations for the character's political arc. Richard Nixon also contributed to the mix. Lucas said that Nixon's presidency got him thinking about how democracies become dictatorships, arriving at the conclusion that "the democracies aren't overthrown; they're given away."

  The parallel most carefully developed in the Lucasfilm-authorized volume Star Wars and History draws a line between Palpatine and the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Both told their senates that corruption was blocking effective governance. Both requested emergency powers and promised to return them once the crisis passed. Both anchored their authority in command of military force. The fiction played out what history had already demonstrated: that the most dangerous kind of coup is one the public helps engineer.

  The characterization in Return of the Jedi also drew from Ming the Merciless of the Flash Gordon comic books. Screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan observed that in that film the Emperor truly holds all the power, while Vader, despite his dignity, remains "very much intimidated by him." Lucas staged the Emperor's arrival at the Death Star to resemble the military parades held on May Day in Russia, grounding the science-fiction spectacle in a recognizable image of authoritarian pageantry.

• 3. The Man Behind the Makeup

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  When the Emperor first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, the character was played by Marjorie Eaton under heavy makeup sculpted by Phil Tippett and applied by Rick Baker, who initially used his own wife, Elaine, for the makeup tests. Chimpanzee eyes were superimposed into darkened eye sockets during post-production, and the voice belonged to Clive Revill. Revill later recalled working with director Irvin Kershner: "It was the perfect example of the old adage 'less is more.'" That version was eventually replaced by Ian McDiarmid in the 2004 DVD release of The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition, when Lucas shot new footage during production of Revenge of the Sith to create continuity across the trilogies.

  McDiarmid came to the role through an unusual path. He had never played a leading role in a feature film when Lucas and director Richard Marquand cast him for Return of the Jedi. A casting director spotted him performing in the Sam Shepard play Seduced at a studio theatre at the Royal Court, where he was playing a dying Howard Hughes. McDiarmid later told BackStage that he never auditioned for the role and had never set his sights on a film career.

  Transforming him into Emperor Palpatine for Return of the Jedi required between two and four hours of makeup per sitting. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that the Emperor looked uncannily like Death in The Seventh Seal. McDiarmid himself found the prosthetic transformation reminiscent of the early silent film The Phantom of the Opera with Lon Chaney. After Return of the Jedi, he went back to stage acting in London and did not return to the role on screen until The Rise of Skywalker in 2019.

• 4. Playing Two Faces at Once

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  The prequel trilogy demanded something unusual from McDiarmid: sustaining two versions of the same man simultaneously, the polished senator and the Sith lord concealed beneath him. Reflecting on The Phantom Menace, he described Palpatine as "conventional on the outside, but demonic on the inside." For Attack of the Clones, he elaborated that Palpatine "is a supreme actor" who must be even more convincing than someone with nothing to hide, because any slip would reveal the schizophrenic gap beneath the charm.

  McDiarmid found a telling detail in a scene where Padme Amidala is nearly assassinated: Palpatine produces what appear to be tears. McDiarmid called them "crocodile tears" and noted that for the character, the pure exercise of power is the only thing that can satisfy him, which made the role "completely fascinating to play because it is an evil soul. He is more evil than the devil."

  In Revenge of the Sith, where lightsaber combat became essential, the 60-year-old actor took fencing lessons alongside his costars. Close-up shots and non-acrobatic sequences of the duel against Mace Windu were performed by McDiarmid himself; stunt doubles handled the advanced acrobatics. For that film, Todd McCarthy of Variety described his portrayal as "dominant" and "worth writing home about," and McDiarmid received a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination for the performance.

• 5. The Machinery of Empire

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  Palpatine's costumes across the prequel trilogy were designed by Trisha Biggar and were themselves a visual argument about how power accumulates. In The Phantom Menace he wears the clothing of a mere senator. By Attack of the Clones the costumes had, as McDiarmid put it, "much more edge to them." His favorite was a high-collared jacket that he described as feeling "reptilian, which is exactly right." Biggar explained that the wardrobe moves "progressively darker and more ornately decorated throughout the movie," running through greys and browns toward black, tracing the character's descent.

  The same logic of incremental takeover runs through the plot mechanics Lucas designed. In The Phantom Menace, Palpatine engineers an invasion of his own home planet to manufacture a crisis, uses that crisis to topple the incumbent chancellor, and wins election as his replacement. A decade later in Attack of the Clones, he exploits a constitutional loophole to stay in office past his term, engineers a war, accepts emergency powers with theatrical reluctance, and promises to relinquish them. By Revenge of the Sith he has become, as the source puts it, a virtual dictator. The Senate votes him extraordinary authority at every step, believing each grant is temporary.

  In The Rise of Skywalker, Palpatine is no longer capable of movement without the aid of a large machine to which he is attached. His eyes lack pupils and his hands are decaying. Costume designer Michael Kaplan put him in a utilitarian black robe for most of the film. When Palpatine briefly rejuvenates himself by absorbing the life energy of Rey and Ben Solo, he changes into a formal robe of red velvet, which Kaplan describes as "his true Emperor's garb."

• 6. Echoes After Death

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  Palpatine's capacity for resurrection is not simply a sequel-trilogy invention. The 1991-1992 comic series Dark Empire, written by Tom Veitch and illustrated by Cam Kennedy, explored the idea decades before The Rise of Skywalker. Set six years after Return of the Jedi, the series depicts Palpatine returning from death as the "Emperor Reborn," his spirit possessing one of his own elite assassins before being transferred into a clone body he had prepared in advance on the planet Byss. Luke Skywalker ultimately defeats him again, with help from Leia Organa Solo, before Palpatine's spirit is permanently destroyed in Empire's End in 1995.

  The canon films took a different approach to the same problem. Rae Carson's novelization of The Rise of Skywalker reveals that Palpatine discovered the secret to immortality from his former master, Darth Plagueis, and used that knowledge to survive his death in Return of the Jedi. The same novel describes his son as a failed clone of himself, though the 2021 book Skywalker: A Family at War refines this to say the son was "an offshoot of genetic research, not precisely a clone but made of cloned tissue and donated cells."

  Director J. J. Abrams addressed the logic of bringing Palpatine back for The Rise of Skywalker directly: "When you look at this as nine chapters of a story, perhaps the weirder thing would be if Palpatine didn't return. His absence entirely from the third trilogy would be conspicuous." That argument treats the nine-film arc as a single work, with Palpatine serving as its organizing evil from first chapter to last.

• 7. A Meme Made Emperor

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  Palpatine's hold on popular culture extends well past the films. Religion scholars Ross Shepard Kraemer, William Cassidy, and Susan Schwartz have compared the character to the theological concept of Satan, noting that he leads faceless minions including his red-robed Imperial Guards. Political figures have reached for his name as a shorthand for sinister consolidation of power. In 2005, Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey compared Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist to Palpatine in a Senate floor speech, bringing a visual aid. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial characterized West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd as "the Emperor Palpatine of pork," with Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska cast as his Darth Vader, after a report linked both to a secret hold on the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006.

  On the internet, a single screenshot of the character from Revenge of the Sith was posted to Reddit in 2017. Its caption read: "The Senate. Upvote this so that people see it when they Google 'The Senate.'" The post became the most upvoted in the history of that website for the next three years, accumulating over 438 thousand upvotes as of 2025.

  The comic series Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, written by Kieron Gillen and Charles Soule and published from 2017 to 2018, pushed the character's reach even further by suggesting that Palpatine manipulated the Force to impregnate Vader's mother Shmi Skywalker, making him in essence Vader's father. Soule cautioned that "the Dark Side is not a reliable narrator," and a Lucasfilm story group collaborator confirmed the direct connection was not their intended reading, leaving that particular thread unresolved.