‘Star Wars’ team never told Palpatine actor how Emperor had kids: ‘Does this evil monster ever have sex?’

Has Emperor Palpatine ever been able to, ahem, do it?

Ian McDiarmid can’t say for sure. In an interview commemorating the 20th anniversary of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, the actor behind Darth Sidious said he never talked to any of the directors of the Star Wars films in which he appeared — George Lucas, Richard Marquand, or J.J. Abrams — about whether his villainous character ever executed Order 69.

“There was never any discussion of any of that,” McDiarmid told Variety, referring to the Emperor having sex. “It was up to me to work it out in my head.”

Star Wars never presented a reason to even consider Palpatine’s sex life until its final movie, 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker, which resurrected the Emperor after he was presumed dead in 1983’s Return of the Jedi and revealed that the sequel trilogy’s protagonist, Rey (Daisy Ridley), was actually his long-lost granddaughter.

McDiarmid did remember discussing a different conception with Lucas, but it didn’t directly involve his character. “There was talk in The Phantom Menace about something called midichlorians, which were involved somehow in Anakin’s birth,” he recalled. “George didn’t want to go too deeply into that. But we reckoned it was kind of virgin birth, though one ought not to say that because God knows you get all sorts of complications.”

But the actor understands the implications of Rey’s lineage in The Rise of Skywalker. “People ask the slightly embarrassing question about, ‘Does this evil monster ever have sex?'” McDiarmid said. “And we don’t really know the answer to that question either — things in tubes, you think about probably, rather than the awful vision that you might have in your head of this monster ever having a sexual relationship with anybody.”

McDiarmid previously told Empire that he thinks it’s possible Palpatine went to Pound Town (or perhaps Pound Planet?). “Please don’t pursue that line too vigorously,” he said, “but yes, he does [have sex]. It’s a horrible idea to think of Palpatine having sex in any shape or form. But then, of course, perhaps he didn’t.”

Though it’s never directly addressed in any of the films, spinoff Star Wars books have confirmed that Palpatine synthetically created his son, Dathan, who eventually became Rey’s father. They clarify that the Emperor didn’t use traditional means to sire an heir — instead, he employed cloning technology and Sith powers to create a son, no Sidious sex required.

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Elsewhere in the Variety interview, McDiarmid explained that he wasn’t sure about Palpatine’s cackling voice when he first debuted as the character in Return of the Jedi.

“I continued to do my little voice like that; George didn’t say stop, and neither did Richard,” he said. “Later we came to revoice everything in the studio in London, with George and Kathleen Kennedy, who I met for the first time, and indeed, Steven Spielberg, who I met for the first time. And when we did the first few scenes, Steven said, ‘Oh my God, you’re evil!’ I thought, ‘That’s a relief.'”

The actor also said he thought he was laying it on too thick in the Revenge of the Sith scene in which Palpatine kills Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson). “I thought I’d gone much too far, and George said, ‘No, no, you can go much further,'” he remembered. “It’s the moment when the monster becomes available and he is ecstatic with delight because he can lose the hypocritical face.”