Neal Scanlan On Creating Palpatine’s Clone in ‘Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker’
Neal Scanlan has an impressive resume designing some of best loved new creatures populating Disney’s Star Wars films. He’s designed costumes for familiar favorites like Chewbacca, and also brought us new favorites like scene-stealer, Babu Frik. Scanlan recently spoke with Collider about bringing back the big bad of the ‘Skywalker Saga’, Sheev Palpatine. The former emperor has been pulling the strings behind the scenes in the new trilogy, having seemingly survived being tossed down a shaft by Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Palpatine is revealed to be a clone. His consciousness somehow survived, but he is need of a new host, as the clone body is badly damaged. The idea gave Scanlan and concept artist, Luke Fischer, the opportunity to have some creative freedom in bringing an altered version of the former Emperor to the screen, while still remaining true to the character as he appeared in Jedi.
Palpatine supposedly died after being hurled down a shaft by Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi.
Respecting Nick Dudman’s Original Make-up Design
Scanlan explained how they respected the original makeup designed by Nick Dudman in the Original Trilogy:
“I remember hearing stories from him [a colleague of Dudman] saying that it was a complete nightmare on set because in those days when the tools they were using were not as sophisticated as what we have available to us today, in many ways he was trying to keep the makeup on during the film sequence. But when you see what they did, it gives a quality I think, which is absolute. If you had done it in a different way, somehow it would have never been as gnarly or as threatening or as interesting as the original version.”
“…We used old age stipple. We used prosthetic pieces. We used silicon-based prosthetic pieces rather than foam. But nonetheless, we sculpted them as closely as we possibly could to what Nick had created. There was a development from his first view that we see him, his first shape or form that we can call it, and then the second shape. So there was some evolution in that. But essentially what we were trying to do was to try and create as faithfully as possible the initial design. It would have felt wrong and almost arrogant to have ignored that.”
Nick Dudman’s make-up for Palpatine in Return of the Jedi.
Clone And Life-Support Concepts
Scanlan explained that Palpatine’s clone went through a number of different designs. The early concepts were “quite extreme” including a dismembered version of him to his body hooked up to an elaborate life support system as seen in the final film.
“Luke Fisher, who is one of the concept designers that works with us, did a lot of sketches of Palpatine being on a kind of life support system. Something that is keeping him alive and keeping him in one piece. And then some parts of his physicality are almost independently being fed the necessary nutrients of life-giving entities. So the idea of him being held on a rig which allowed him to move around and almost the Nosferatu aspect of that sequence, all of those things were part of trying to come to understand how much we would show with that.”
The interview does not shed any light on how Scanlan and Fischer worked collaboratively with production designer, Rick Carter, who designed the Sith planet Exegol, including Palpatine’s throne in Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker.
Source: Collider
