Earlier this week we dropped a piece of concept art showing you one of the looks that was considered for Andy Serkis’ Supreme Leader Snoke in J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Today Entertainment Weekly released an interview in which Serkis provided some information regarding his big bad in the upcoming film. For starters, the design of Snoke hadn’t even been settled on when filming began, and it continued to evolve after filming ended. Writer Anthony Breznican even threw our concept art a little shout-out and confirmed what we had reported about the Supreme Leader, “Snoke kept changing, not only through principle photography, but even after. (So any “early concept art” that may be floating around online is probably nowhere near what this dark-hearted character looks like.)”

On how the character evolved while working with Abrams, Serkis stated:

“When we first started working on it, he had some rough notions of how Snoke was gonna look, but it really hadn’t been fully-formed and it almost came out of discussion and performance.” 

“We shot on set of course, and I was in the scenes I have with other actors, but the beauty of this process is you can go back and reiterate, keep informing and honing beats and moments,” Serkis says. “So J.J., after we shot last year, we’ve had a series of sessions where I’d be in London at The Imaginarium, my studio, while he’s been directing from L.A., and we’ve literally been creating further additions and iterations to the character. That’s been fascinating. And in the meantime I’ve been able to see the look and design of the character grow and change as the performances change. So it’s been really exciting in that respect.”

Serkis also provides a little insight into the Supreme Leader’s motivations:

“Supreme Leader Snoke is quite an enigmatic character, and strangely vulnerable at the same time as being quite powerful,” Serkis says. “Obviously he has a huge agenda. He has suffered a lot of damage. As I said, there is a strange vulnerability to him, which belies his true agenda, I suppose.”

“He’s a new character in this universe. It is very much a newly-introduced character,” Serkis says. “He’s aware of what’s gone on, in the respect that he has been around and is aware of prior events. I think it’d be fair to say that he is aware of the past to a great degree.”

It also looks like this bad guy will not resemble a frail old man, instead Serkis says we can expect something more imposing:

“The scale of him, for instance, is one reason. He is large. He appears tall. And also just the facial design – you couldn’t have gotten there with prosthetics. It’s too extreme. Without giving too much away at this point, he has a very distinctive, idiosyncratic bone structure and facial structure. You could never have done it [in real life.]”

I can’t wait to see what Serkis and Abrams have cooked up on December 17th.