Adam Driver did not sound like a man walking away from Star Wars. He sounded like a man reading out a verdict someone else had signed. Asked on The Rich Eisen Show whether he was finished with Kylo Ren, he said yes, and then spent the rest of the answer explaining why the decision was never his. The Hunt for Ben Solo, the film he wanted to make, had a director, a script and a studio that liked it. What it did not have was the approval of the two men above that studio.

Most of the coverage reads his line as an actor closing a door. His own sentences point elsewhere: “We tried,” “I don’t get to decide,” “It’s not our call.” The door was shut at Disney, and one of the two executives who shut it is still the one Lucasfilm answers to, even after the change of leadership that fans hoped would reopen the case.

What Driver told Rich Eisen

Driver was on the show to promote his new film, Paper Tiger. Eisen asked him directly whether he was done playing Kylo Ren. “Yeah, it’s over… No more ‘Star Wars,'” Driver answered, according to Variety. “We tried to do one more,” he said, “but they’re like, ‘No, he’s dead.'”

Steven Soderbergh was going to direct. “We worked on it for a few years, really and earnestly. We got a script together that was really good with Scott Burns, Rebecca Blunt, and Soderbergh and I,” Driver said. “It was awesome. It was really cool. But you know, I don’t get to decide.” When Eisen asked what would happen if someone wanted to resurrect the project, Driver put the decision back where he had placed it all along: “If they wanted to, fine. But we’re not… It’s not our call. I think the ship has sailed though.”

The no came from above Lucasfilm

Driver had already named who said no when he first revealed the film to the Associated Press, and Variety reprinted the quote this week: “We presented the script to Lucasfilm. They loved the idea. They totally understood our angle and why we were doing it. We took it to Bob Iger and Alan Bergman, and they said no. They didn’t see how Ben Solo was alive. And that was that.”

Lucasfilm has since changed hands. Kathleen Kennedy stepped down as president, Dave Filoni became president and chief creative officer, and Lynwen Brennan became co-president. According to The Hollywood Reporter, both report to Alan Bergman, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment. The new leadership is new at Lucasfilm and nowhere above it: the second name in Driver’s sentence is still the name at the top of the studio’s reporting line. Disney also has a new chief executive, Josh D’Amaro, whom fans addressed by name in their campaign. The answer has not moved. Asked about the film at Disney’s D23 convention, Filoni was brief: “It’s not here, you won’t find it here. The force is not with us in that regard; I love the love you feel for it.”

Soderbergh had closed his side earlier. Asked by The Playlist whether he would revisit the project under the new regime, he said “Nope,” and added: “Look, if it was gonna happen, it would have happened. It’s that simple.”

Disney still wants Adam Driver, just not as Ben Solo

The veto was never on the actor. At the same D23, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige announced Driver as the villain Mister Sinister in the studio’s X-Men reboot, directed by Jake Schreier. “Kevin and I had been talking for years about my joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I think we finally found the perfect film,” Driver told the crowd by video, as reported by the Associated Press. Disney keeps the actor and retires the character.

What it turned down was a way of making these films as much as a sequel. Driver described the plan to the AP as deliberately modest: “We wanted to be judicial about how to spend money and be economical with it, and do it for less than most but in the same spirit of what those movies are, which is handmade and character-driven.” His stated standard was The Empire Strikes Back. Soderbergh, who had directed him in Logan Lucky, has said the impulse was entirely Driver’s: “Otherwise, I never in a million years would have found myself in that universe again.” An auteur who would never have chosen the franchise, drawn into it by an actor’s conviction about a character and a smaller budget, is the kind of experiment a saga of this size rarely signs off on. The stated objection was continuity, since Ben Solo dies at the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in a series that, as The A.V. Club pointed out, found a way to bring Palpatine back.

How the project got here

According to Empire, Driver and Soderbergh first took the idea to Kennedy in 2021, and Lucasfilm executives including Filoni greeted it with enthusiasm. The script was developed with Scott Z. Burns and Jules Asner, who writes as Rebecca Blunt. Driver made the project public in October 2025, which set off a fan campaign: a banner plane over Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, a billboard in Times Square and, in March, a skydiver at Toronto Comic-Con carrying a message for D’Amaro. On Eisen’s show Driver called that response “pretty incredible,” adding: “I didn’t expect that it was going to be billboards and people flying planes over Disney and things like that. That was pretty cool.”

Kennedy’s exit was announced in January 2026, Soderbergh spoke to The Playlist in April, and the D23 announcements came in August. The next Star Wars film in cinemas is Shawn Levy‘s Star Wars: Starfighter, with Ryan Gosling, on May 28, 2027. X-Men is dated for May 2028.

The next Disney poster with Adam Driver’s face on it will say X-Men, not Star Wars.