Fans are expecting some skeletons to come out of the closet in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, as it’ll no doubt feature revelations about Rey’s past, Kylo Ren’s past and maybe even Luke and Leia’s. Or Palpatine’s. One character we weren’t necessarily anticipating to get some backstory on in the movie, though, was Poe Dameron. However, Oscar Isaac has now promised that audiences will get to know more about the ace pilot’s past and they’ll be “surprised” by it, too.
While speaking to ET Canada, the actor teased that Poe wasn’t always the Resistance hero we know and love and apparently, we’ll get to find out who he used to be in Episode IX.
“Particularly with Poe, I think people will be surprised to see that he has a bit more of an ambiguous past. He’s not just kind of that squeaky-clean flyboy.”
One reason we didn’t see some of Poe’s backstory coming in Rise was because Marvel’s Star Wars comics have filled in a few of the blanks before with their Poe Dameron series, which spanned from just prior to The Force Awakens to the end of The Last Jedi. Likewise, Shattered Empire revealed the identity of Poe’s parents, who were Rebel pilots that had their son two years after the Battle of Endor.
However, there’s still plenty more room to explore there, with his adolescent years and young adult life a clean slate in the canon so far. And given how great Isaac has been in the role, it can only be a good thing that we’ll find out some new textures to his character, as we perhaps don’t know Poe quite as well as Rey, Finn or Kylo at this point. Not to mention that we can now add the mystery of what Poe used to get up to to the growing list of questions we want answered in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.