Oscar Isaac’s infamous Star Wars line still haunts him

Star Wars is well known for its one-liners. There’s “I have a bad feeling about this” and the ever-wonderful “May the Force be with you.” For Oscar Isaac, however, there’s one line in particular that has followed him since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker: “Somehow Palpatine returned.”

Speaking with producer Josh Horowitz on his podcast Happy, Sad and Confused, the host asked Isaac whether he knew that line was “doing and saying a lot.”

“Those were reshoots,” Isaac explained. “That was obviously a new addition, so there was a lot of movement and flux throughout that whole thing.”

As for whether he knew that line would become one of the most memeable quotes of his career, Isaac laughs. “I wouldn’t have known!”

“Somehow Palpatine returned” is just one of several lines throughout The Rise of Skywalker that a vocal portion of Star Wars fans have held up as an example of a lack of care in conveying narrative cohesion within the film, and the sequel trilogy overall. While Palpatine’s return did seem awfully sudden — and was ridiculously announced via a poorly thought-out event in the battle royale video game Fortnite, of all things — there were subtle hints that Palpatine may play a part in the sequel trilogy. For one, his theme song shares similar notes with Rey’s theme, and the villain Snoke indicates he wasn’t working alone in The Last Jedi. Even before confirmation in The Rise of Skywalker, there were several theories that Rey’s lineage was somehow connected to Palpatine.

The line’s biggest crime isn’t that Palpatine returned. The villain had proven several times before that you can’t keep a good Sith down. The biggest issue is that delivering this information to the Resistance Base in a single line completely undersells Palpatine as a character; he wasn’t just a Sith Lord, a terrifying thing in its own right; he was also a genocidal dictator whose tyrannical grip on the galaxy led to an era of fear and oppression. His manipulations spanned many years and led not only to the fall of Anakin Skywalker but also to the collapse of an entire political system, the Republic. Reducing Palpatine’s reveal to a single exasperated throwaway line from Isaac feels ridiculous, and it’s little wonder why the line has become part of meme culture throughout the years.

At least Isaac has found humor in his worst Star Wars line. “I committed to the exasperation — that’s for sure.”