Via Slashfilm.com:
It was one of the biggest mystery box questions that J.J. Abrams left hanging at the end of The Force Awakens: Who are Rey’s parents?
The question caught fire on the Reddit threads and internet forums in the two years between Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, with fans speculating that Rey was related to everyone from Luke Skywalker, to Han and Leia, and even to Snoke. While writing the script for Last Jedi, Rian Johnson wrestled with Rey’s origins just as much as fans did. Maybe even more so, the The Last Jedi director said in an upcoming interview with The /Filmcast. In the process, he explored every option that the internet suggested, and then some. And some of them are pretty ridiculous.
Much to the chagrin of many passionate Star Wars fans who had drawn up an elaborate story of who their big heroine was, the big world-changing twist about Rey’s origins in The Last Jedi turned out to be…the polar opposite of that. Instead, Rey was revealed to be a “nobody” whose parents sold her off for no greater reason than to buy their next meal or drink. It completely upended the expectations of the Star Wars franchise. But that wasn’t Johnson’s intention, or even his plan, from the beginning. “It’s not like I was aware of those expectations and was trying to purposefully poke people in the eye,” Johnson said. “I was writing based on my honest gut reactions to what the most powerful turn of events would be to those questions.”
And before Johnson could come up with radical, subversive answers to The Force Awakens‘ mystery box, he had to break a few eggs. His process? A document he called “The Big Ass Document,” where he would list questions to try to organize his thought process. For Rey, he had a whole list of possibilities for her origins, which ranged from ridiculous to even more ridiculous.
“I honestly listed everything I could think of, even awful possibilities where I said, ‘This is not what we’re going to do.’ I mean the less silly one was, ‘Is she a clone?’ Anything that’s a theory on Reddit now I guarantee was listed on that document.
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