In what could easily have been a potshot at Disney, this star, who just signed on to play a major role in multiple upcoming Marvel projects, has made a statement that has left MCU fans confused. But if you were a fan of the actor’s earlier, smaller-scale work, his opinion may come as less of a surprise, since he seemed to gravitate toward more indie productions until recently.
At the London premiere of Paper Tiger, his most recent movie, which debuted earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Driver said that he preferred working on smaller sets. “When it’s a bigger budget, sometimes it gets into moviemaking by committee, and I just don’t do well in those atmospheres,” he elaborated. This obviously comes after Driver starred in all three Star Wars sequel films, The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker, as Kylo Ren, who was later revealed as Ben Solo. Fans are now speculating that the comments were aimed at Disney, especially in the wake of the proposed Hunt for Ben Solo being shelved by higher-ups after the script was nearly complete and Driver had stated that he was willing to return to the role.
It’s entirely possible, as he announced earlier this year, that he’d been working with writer Steven Soderbergh on a script for a film that would bring Ben Solo back to the Star Wars universe and essentially undo some of the events of the wildly controversial Rise of Skywalker. Speaking with the Associated Press, Driver said, “I had been talking about doing another one since 2021. Kathleen (Kennedy) had reached out. I always said: With a great director and a great story, I’d be there in a second. I loved that character and loved playing him.” He thought he had that with Soderbergh, Rebecca Blunt, and Scott Z. Burns, who he said wrote “one of the coolest f*cking scripts I had ever been a part of.”
Now, though, despite his feelings about working on big-budget films, Driver is set to enter the MCU as Mr. Sinister, a villain Fox first started planting the seeds for 10 years ago in X-Men: Apocalypse, though they never managed to actually bring him to the big screen. But the time has come, and X-Men fans are finally getting the geneticist behind some of the darkest X-Men plots from the comics. And with his role in the upcoming movies officially attached to the alias Nathanial Millbury, we’ve been given a clue about the narrative we’ll get for Mr. Sinister—one that ties him closely to Cyclops and a ton of freaky human and mutant experimentation. So whatever Driver’s feelings really are about working on blockbuster movies, or whether he was just hinting at his feelings about Disney productions in particular, fans still have a few big-budget Driver films to look forward to.
