Supreme Leader Snoke

• 1. Introduction

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  Supreme Leader Snoke stepped onto a movie set before anyone, including the actor playing him, knew what he would look like. Andy Serkis later said, 'It's the first time I've been on set not yet knowing what the character's gonna look like. I mean, talk about secrecy!' Snoke is a fictional character in the Star Wars franchise, an artificial being aligned with the dark side of the Force. Introduced in The Force Awakens in 2015, Snoke served as Supreme Leader of the First Order and master to Kylo Ren. He returned in The Last Jedi in 2017, where his own apprentice killed him. Every version of Snoke onscreen is computer generated, performed through motion capture by Serkis. He came back to briefly voice the character in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019. Who built a villain this elaborate in near total secrecy, and why did the answer to his origins take years to surface? What was Snoke actually made to be, and why did his death leave so many fans unsatisfied? The story starts with a face that kept changing before anyone had settled on one at all.

• 2. Sculpting An Enigma

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  Snoke's face changed constantly through principal photography and postproduction on The Force Awakens. His voice and his movements evolved right alongside it, shifting as Andy Serkis and writer-director J. J. Abrams pushed the visual effects team further. Senior sculptor Ivan Manzella recalled a version that nearly went somewhere else entirely. 'Snoke almost became a female at one point,' he said. 'J. J. picked out a maquette he liked and then we took it to a full-size version, sculpted in plasteline. J. J. and creature creative supervisor Neal Scanlan didn't want him to be old and decrepit, like Emperor Palpatine.'

  Manzella pointed to a further influence behind one of the maquettes. A reference Abrams made to Hammer House of Horror pointed him toward Peter Cushing's face. Cushing had played Grand Moff Tarkin in the original Star Wars film, tying Snoke's earliest form to that far older villain. That static, plasteline face still had to survive its leap into a living, moving performance.

• 3. Becoming Snoke

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  Andy Serkis secretly joined The Force Awakens in February 2014, months before the wider world knew Snoke existed. His casting was first announced on the 29th of April 2014. When a reporter asked about his role that July, Serkis brushed off the question with a joke: 'I'm not Yoda.'

  In May 2015, StarWars.com published an interview with photographer Annie Leibovitz about her Force Awakens shoot for Vanity Fair. The piece revealed that Serkis was playing a CGI character named Supreme Leader Snoke, alongside an image of him in motion-capture gear. Serkis had built a career on such roles already. He had voiced and moved the titular gorilla in 2005's King Kong, and played Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot series.

  By November 2015, Serkis was describing how loosely Snoke had started. 'When we first started working on it, Abrams had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn't been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance,' he said. 'So J.J., after we shot last year, we've had a series of sessions where I'd be in London at The Imaginarium, my studio, while he's been directing from L.A., and we've literally been creating further additions and iterations to the character.'

  Lupita Nyong'o, who played the CGI character Maz Kanata in the same film, said Serkis coached her through her own performance-capture scenes. He told her that 'a motion-capture character you develop the same way as any other. You have to understand who the character is and what makes them who they are.'

  Serkis called his first day on set 'quite an unusual situation,' working specifically with Domhnall Gleeson and Adam Driver. 'My first day was basically standing on a 25-foot podium doing Lord Snoke without the faintest idea what he looked like... or in fact who he was!' The crew used what he called a 'Kongolizer' method, sending sound through speakers to suggest Snoke's scale and distance from the other actors. He called it 'probably one of my most scary film experiences I've ever had.' Getting Snoke's performance right was only half the challenge; his physical world still needed a look of its own.

• 4. Designing The Throne Room

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  Costume designer Michael Kaplan dressed Snoke in gold robes for The Last Jedi. The choice was a deliberate contrast against the deep red and black of his throne room. Director Rian Johnson said the red was meant to evoke curtains, a nod to The Wizard of Oz, where the title character hides behind one. Johnson wanted the space to feel theatrical, unlike Emperor Palpatine's more utilitarian throne room in the earlier films.

  Concept designers built that throne room from an unused idea for Return of the Jedi. That older concept art had depicted a lava-based lair for the Emperor beneath the surface of Coruscant. According to The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary, published in 2017, Snoke wears a gold ring. It is set with obsidian taken from Darth Vader's castle on Mustafar. The glyphs around that obsidian reference four philosophers whose statues stood in Palpatine's office, a detail first seen in Attack of the Clones. During a tense confrontation between Snoke and Rey, Palpatine's musical theme plays in the background. None of that design work explained who Snoke actually was, a question the films left hanging for years.

• 5. What Snoke Actually Is

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  In the story, Snoke is a 'genetic strandcast,' a type of clone Palpatine created to act as his proxy in power. Abrams called him 'a powerful figure on the dark side of the Force.' Serkis described his character as 'quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful. Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage.' Serkis called Snoke 'a new character in this universe,' adding that 'it'd be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.'

  Serkis explained before the film's premiere why computer generation was the only viable option for Snoke's look. 'The scale of him, for instance, is one reason. He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design, you couldn't have gotten there with prosthetics... he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone and facial structure.' Chief of creature and droid effects Neal Scanlan agreed, noting Snoke's extreme size. 'This character is much better executed as a CGI character. That's just a practical reality when he's 7-foot-something tall; he's very, very thin.'

  Snoke's 'scarred, cavernous face' stayed hidden until the film's release, appearing only as a 'massive, ominous hologram' onscreen. His deep voice reached audiences earlier, first heard in the teaser trailer released on the 28th of November 2014.

  Before The Rise of Skywalker arrived in 2019, fans had floated several rival theories about Snoke's true identity. Some guessed he was Darth Plagueis, a Sith Lord mentioned in passing in Revenge of the Sith who supposedly had the power to prevent death. Others guessed Palpatine himself, or Gallius Rax, the mysterious 'Operator' from Chuck Wendig's Aftermath novel trilogy. Still others pointed to Ezra Bridger, a lead character from the animated series Star Wars Rebels. None of those theories anticipated how critics would react to the character everyone could already see.

• 6. A Chorus Of Critics

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  Robbie Collin of The Telegraph described the disfigured, skeletal Snoke as a 'sepulchral horror.' Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called him 'hissing and grotesque.' Andrew O'Hehir of Salon dubbed the character 'a spectral demonic figure.'

  Variety's Justin Chang compared Snoke to one of Serkis's earlier roles, writing that he resembled 'a plus-sized, more articulate version of his character Gollum.' Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly described Snoke as 'essentially Emperor Palpatine crossed with one of the aliens from Close Encounters.' Stephanie Zacharek of Time called him 'a giant, scary, noseless dude who sits placidly in an oversized chair like a dark-lord version of the Lincoln Monument.' Those first impressions of Snoke's design said nothing yet about how the rest of his story would be judged.

• 7. The Puppet's Plan

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  Kylo Ren, the masked enforcer under Snoke's command, was really Ben Solo, son of Han Solo and Leia Organa. Snoke sensed an 'awakening' in the Force and warned Ren that his power would be tested against his own father. That test would come during the search for a droid, BB-8, which carried a map to Luke Skywalker. Snoke later ordered General Hux to destroy the New Republic with the Starkiller Base superweapon. He then ordered Ren to capture Rey after she refused to hand over the map. When Rey defeated Ren in a lightsaber duel, Snoke ordered Hux to bring his fallen apprentice back for further training.

  Following the earlier film, Snoke led First Order forces in pursuit of an outnumbered Resistance. He reprimanded Hux for his military failures and Ren for failing to defeat Rey or find Luke. When Ren finally brought Rey before him, Snoke tortured her for information on Luke's location. He then revealed something else: he had engineered a psychic bond between Ren and Rey as part of a scheme to destroy Luke. Snoke then ordered Ren to kill Rey. Ren instead turned on his master, cutting Snoke in half with a lightsaber. He then declared himself the new Supreme Leader and blamed Rey for the killing.

  In The Rise of Skywalker, Ren discovered several clones resembling Snoke inside Palpatine's lair on the Sith world Exegol. Palpatine briefly used Snoke's voice himself while speaking to Ren, revealing that he had built Snoke purely as a puppet. That puppet had been used to lure Ren toward the dark side and to help Palpatine reclaim the galaxy through the First Order.

  According to The Rise of Skywalker: The Visual Dictionary, published in 2019, Palpatine purposefully shaped Snoke's appearance so that his species could never be identified. Snoke's own reluctance to meet First Order underlings in person helped hide the fact that he was artificial. General Pryde was one of the only characters who knew Snoke answered to someone higher. The Star Wars Book, released in 2020 and co-authored by Lucasfilm's Pablo Hidalgo, suggested Snoke himself might not have known his own origins. In the comic series The Rise of Kylo Ren, Ren blames Luke for Snoke's injuries.

  Alan Dean Foster's 2015 novelization of The Force Awakens adds an earlier layer to the manipulation. In it, Leia tells Han that Snoke had long watched their son. He was aware their son would be 'strong with the Force' and hold 'equal potential for good or evil.' Snoke had manipulated events all along to pull him toward the dark side. Snoke's reach extended into games and comics too. An unplayable Lego minifigure version of him appeared in the 2016 video game Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He later became a playable Dark Side character in Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. In the spring of 2018, he joined the mobile game Star Wars: Force Arena as a playable Dark Side squad leader. The 2019 one-shot comic Age of Resistance: Villains, Supreme Leader Snoke, gave him a taunting line to Kylo: 'If I had your uncle by my side instead of you, the galaxy would have been mine a long time ago.' None of this reached audiences until after critics and fans had already rendered their verdict on the character they'd watched onscreen.

• 8. Judged By Critics And Fans

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  Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter offered an early verdict: 'Supreme Leader Snoke is a larger-than-life, vaguely Harry Potter-ish hologram voiced with deep gravity by Andy Serkis; the full weight of this character's malignancy and dramatic power will presumably be better assessed in subsequent episodes.' Richard Roeper, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, called Serkis 'the undisputed champion of the performance-capture roles.' Variety's Justin Chang praised the effects' 'unobtrusive sophistication' but judged Serkis 'fine but not galvanizing' in the part. Lindsay Bahr of the Associated Press ranked Snoke among the 'less memorable' characters in The Force Awakens. In 2016, Serkis was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for Best Virtual Performance.

  Some viewers felt Snoke's arc never got the development it needed. Fan theories about his origins had grown so entrenched that many struggled to accept his death in The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson's choice to kill the character without further explanation drew criticism from a wide range of viewers.

  Serkis addressed that criticism directly, saying producers wanted Snoke 'to have a great deal of mystery.' He added that he had 'been asked to not shed anything should they want to bring him back in any way, whether prequel or whatever.' Forbes went further, faulting The Force Awakens for never exploring Snoke's backstory or his 'inexplicable rise to power,' calling the character 'a bandage poorly placed over a gaping plot-hole.' Serkis agreed the missing backstory felt 'incredibly frustrating' to some fans, though he framed it as room to expand the character later.

  Despite its criticism of the writing, Forbes still praised Serkis's performance across both films. The outlet turned notably warmer toward his work in The Last Jedi. It singled out Snoke's death and his fractured bond with his apprentice, Kylo Ren, as the character's strongest material. Ian McDiarmid returned to play the Emperor whose voice had been hiding inside Snoke since before the trilogy even began.