The new, Disney-owned Star Wars series has established itself not only as the foremost money-making franchise in the movie industry, but also as the most secretive. Everyone involved in the films is very tight-lipped about what's going to happen in future films, with some actors not even being allowed to share what characters they're playing. One of these actors is three-time Golden Globe winner Laura Dern, who will be playing somebody in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. But some fans think they've figured out who it is she'll be playing, and they believe Laura Dern will play Rey's mom in The Last Jedi.
Right now, that's just a theory, and it's definitely not confirmed. The theory has been floating around for over a year now, and to be honest there's not a whole lot of evidence behind it. The two main pieces of evidence for the theory, if you want to call it that, are this: First, Dern is a relatively big-named actress, so therefore she must be playing someone of importance, and there's perhaps no new character who could be more important than Rey's mom. Secondly, her age (she's 50) puts her more in the ballpark of the older Star Wars characters than the new generation. She's easily the right age to be Rey's mother, and if Luke Skywalker ends up being Rey's father, then she is also a conceivable match for him as well (she's 15 years Mark Hamill's junior, but this is Hollywood I'm talking about here). But if Dern doesn't end up being Rey's mom, then who else could she be playing?
Another theory that's been floating around for the better part of a year originated on the website Latino Review, which sometimes reports accurate spoilers and sometimes completely misses the mark with their supposed leaked information, so take this with a grain of salt. The site reported last March, in a story that now seems to have been scrubbed from the internet, that Dern plays a high-ranking official within the Resistance who is opposed to Leia's leadership. According to Screen Crush's reporting of the Latino Review story, the two of them have different ideologies as to what the goals of the Resistance should be, and this leads to Dern's character and Poe Dameron essentially becoming enemies, with Dameron eventually leading a mutiny against Dern's character in support of Leia. Now I can't say whether or not any of this is true, but it's definitely a more detailed and original take on whom Dern could be playing compared to the theory that she's Rey's mom.
Fans probably won't know whether or not Laura Dern is playing Rey's mother until The Last Jedi premieres in December, so until then, let's see what other theories people come up with.
