Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker gets a romantic spinoff as Kylo Ren proposes to Rey in a Pride & Prejudice deepfake. The fates of would-be Sith Lord Kylo Ren and plucky scavenger Rey first became intertwined in the franchise reviving The Force Awakens, as the two new Star Wars characters squared off in a lightsaber duel that surprisingly (to some) ended with the neophyte Rey besting her relatively experienced rival.
After that initial intense encounter between the two characters, it seemed Rey and Kylo were destined to be bitter enemies, but The Last Jedi actually turned the tables by bringing the adversaries together for an epic battle against the evil Snoke that ended with the mysterious character being shockingly vanquished. Following their team-up in The Last Jedi, fans longing for a Kylo Ren/Rey romance had high hopes their dreams would be realized in the trilogy-capping Rise of Skywalker, but unfortunately J.J. Abrams had different ideas as the movie’s epic finale saw Kylo/Ben Solo dying in a moment of redemptive self-sacrifice after he and Rey did battle with a cloned Emperor Palpatine. A recent TROS novelization revealed that the two characters did at least share a touching moment after Kylo’s death, as his ghost spoke to her through the Force to reassure her that he would always be by her side.
For fans who don’t think Kylo and Rey received the ending they deserved in Rise of Skywalker, there’s a new deepfake video that tries to rectify things by providing the characters with a much more romantic fate. Indeed, the deepfake is so romantic that it’s literally a scene from Pride & Prejudice. The clip from YouTube user madGANs reworks a moment from 2005’s adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel, casting Adam Driver as Mr. Darcy and Daisy Ridley as Elizabeth Bennett. See the clip in the space below:
The real Pride & Prejudice scene of course stars Keira Knightley as Elizabeth and Matthew Macfadyen as Darcy, two of the most beloved romantic characters in all of literature. After viewing the deepfake though, it’s easy to imagine Driver and Ridley stepping into the same roles, and indeed it would not be shocking to now see a strong fan push for a new adaptation of the Austen novel starring those exact actors.
In terms of the scene serving as a better ending for Kylo Ren and Rey, it takes more than a little imagination to really see the characters in Driver and Ridley’s “performances,” but fans who loved the Kylo/Rey combo and wished to see them wind up together at the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker will no doubt have no trouble getting over that particular hurdle. Ultimately though, it probably made the most sense story-wise to have things play out as they did in the real movie, with Kylo/Ben sacrificing himself and thereby achieving redemption – giving him in essence the same ending as Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader – while Rey went off alone as Luke Skywalker himself finally did. At the very least, that ending brought a certain symmetry to the overall saga, even if it wasn’t at all satisfying from a romantic point-of-view.
