The current issue of Rolling Stone has a massive cover story all about Star Wars: The Last Jedi. You can read the article here – it features extensive interviews with Daisy Ridley, Mark Hamill, director Rian Johnson and Kylo Ren himself, Adam Driver. Kylo Ren is sort of a perfect Star Wars villain – petty and childish, vindictive and bratty, driven and ambitious and yet still partly unformed. And yes, Kylo Ren is emo. He is the Emo Brat we all deserve. Everyone talked about Kylo Ren being emo when the first movie came out, and someone brilliant even started an Emo Kylo Ren Twitter account. But as it turns out, Adam Driver literally has no idea what “emo” even is. Which might be the most emo thing of all. From Rolling Stone:

Adam Driver has a question for me. “What,” he asks, “is emo?”

Between training for the Marines and training at Juilliard to become one of his generation’s most extraordinary actors, Driver missed some stuff, including entire music genres. But the rest of the world (including an amusing parody Twitter account) decided there’s something distinctly emo about his character, with his luxuriant hair, black outfits and periodic temper tantrums. “You have someone who’s being told that he’s special his whole life,” Driver says of his character, “and he can feel it. And he feels everything probably more intensely than the people around him, you know?”

As anyone who’s seen Driver in practically anything, even Girls, could tell you, the actor himself seems to feel things more strongly than most. “I don’t think of myself as a particularly intense person,” he says, possibly not unaware that he is making intense eye contact, and that his right knee is bouncing up and down with excess energy. “I get obsessive about certain things and, like, enjoy the process of working on something.” He’s in a Brooklyn cafe, on a tree-lined street, that seems to be his go-to spot for interviews.

He refuses to see his character as bratty. “There is a little bit of an elitist, royalty thing going on,” he says, reminding us that the character’s estranged mom is “the princess. I think he’s aware of maybe the privilege.” He does acknowledge playing Kylo Ren younger than his own age of 34: “I don’t want to say how much younger, ’cause people will read into it. . . .” He flushes, and later says he regrets mentioning it at all. If it’s a plot spoiler, it’s unclear exactly how, unless it’s related to his unexplained connection to Rey.

[From Rolling Stone]

What is more emo, pretending not to know what “emo” is yet encapsulating emo perfectly, or actually knowing what emo is and aiming to be that? It’s true that Adam Driver – as a person, separate from Kylo Ren – is more of a hipster than anything else. But having lived through the ‘90s, I can see the definitive through-line of it all: goth became alt-rock, alt-rock became emo, emo became hipster. Driver feels all of the emotions, and he makes sure Kylo Ren does too. What is emo, indeed. That’s like trying to explain why kittens cry.

Cover courtesy of Rolling Stone, additional photo courtesy of WENN.