Nearly 12 years ago, we got our very first glimpse at the new big Star Wars villain — Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, the grandson of Darth Vader — in what would become one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Smack dab in the middle of the first teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ren lumbers through a snowy planet and fires up his red lightsaber. A second later – in a moment in which the internet would lose its collective mind – he switched on the crossguard of his saber, a big screen first.
While the exact design of Kylo Ren’s lightsaber has been canonically explained, many of the secrets about its creation have been under wraps – until now. Jet Cooper, the 3D Modelling Supervisor of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, says that both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader’s sliced-off hands directly led to the inclusion of the crossguard on Kylo Ren’s saber. I spoke with Cooper exclusively about the many decisions that went into crafting the iconic weapon and how much changed between the initial design and on-screen product.
The lightsaber had gone through various iterations throughout the design process. Cooper and The Force Awakens director and producer J.J. Abrams dug back centuries, looking at knights’ swords, for inspiration.
“The original [version] was in a saber shape without a flare on the end of it,” Cooper says, “because Kylo Ren was very much a knight but really, really crude. We’d suggested casually in a conversation one day that everyone was losing their hands. Luke lost his hand. Vader lost his hand. And the reason Europeans put quillons on swords was to stop that from happening.
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