Obi-Wan Kenobi writer reveals changes to Reva's arc from his original movie script

(Image credit: Lucasfilm)

*Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Obi-Wan Kenobi*

Obi-Wan Kenobi is as much about the titular Jedi's complicated history with Anakin Skywalker's Darth Vader as it is Reva's. Across the Disney Plus show's six episodes, it slowly revealed that the Imperial Inquisitor was one of the Jedi younglings that survived Anakin's violent attack in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and that she's been hunting him ever since.

When Stuart Beattie first wrote the story that would later become the basis of Obi-Wan Kenobi, however, Reva – eventually played by Moses Ingram – didn't know that Anakin was Darth Vader. "I was like, 'How'd she know that?' All she saw was Anakin as Anakin because he hadn't changed in the suit yet, right? So Anakin killed her friends, put the scar on her, almost killed her, left her for dead, basically," he explained to The Direct.

"So, in her mind, the Jedi Council were the biggest villains in the galaxy. She believed the lies that they were plotting a coup to overtake and get power and all that, but they were stopped by the Clones. So she believed that's why she's hunting Jedi, because she believed the Jedi are the worst, basically."

Beattie went on to reveal that, in the early screenplay, Reva died at the hands of Vader, after she discovered who he really was, and she elected to sacrifice herself in order to save Kenobi and atone for her past sins against the Jedi. In the miniseries, Reva gets stabbed by Vader but lives, later overcoming her trauma and ultimately setting aside her vengeful plot, sparing Anakin's son Luke.

"It was Obi-Wan kind of letting her in on that secret and that revelation that makes her kind of go, 'Oh my god, I've been wrong this whole time.' So she goes and [tells] Vader, 'I killed Kenobi', knowing that Vader would kill her. So, that kind of completed her arc," he recalled, before laughing: "She'd done so many terrible things, I felt she had to die. You can only redeem so much."

Elsewhere in the lengthy interview, Beattie revealed that he had originally pitched Obi-Wan Kenobi as a movie trilogy – but several plans for any future big-screen projects were scrapped following the release of Solo."[Joby Harold, Obi-Wan Kenobi's head writer] took my scripts and turned it from two hours into six," he said. "So, I did not work with them at all, I just got credit for the episodes because it was all my stuff."