• Damon Lindelof was fired from a Star Wars movie in 2023 after two years of development with co-writers Justin Britt-Gibson and Rayna McClendon
• His script would have centered on Daisy Ridley’s Rey and explored the franchise’s war between nostalgia and reinvention — what he called “the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars”
• Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight was hired to replace Lindelof and Britt-Gibson, but that version also stalled
• Lindelof says the writing was genuinely hard — nailing the tone, the canon placement, and the relationship to Episode IX all proved elusive
• His comments land the same week The Mandalorian and Grogu opens in theaters, the first Star Wars film since 2019

Damon Lindelof just said out loud what a lot of Star Wars fans have been whispering for years — and he did it by describing his own firing.

The creator of Lost, The Leftovers, and HBO’s Watchmen appeared on The Ringer-Verse’s House of R podcast this week and decided to address what he called “the Bantha in the room”: the fact that he was fired off a Star Wars movie. He didn’t hedge. He didn’t spin it. He just told the story.

“They asked me, ‘What do you think a Star Wars movie should be?’ And I said, ‘Here’s what it should be.’ And they said, ‘Great, you’re hired.’ And then two years later, I was fired,” Lindelof said. “And so I was wrong. At least through that prism.”

The project was first announced in 2022, with Lindelof and co-writer Justin Britt-Gibson developing what would eventually be revealed as a Rey-centric New Jedi Order story — set after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, with Daisy Ridley returning as Rey as she attempts to rebuild the Jedi Order. Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was attached to helm it. By 2023, Lindelof and Britt-Gibson were out, replaced by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. That version has since stalled too.

What the Movie Would Have Actually Been About

Here’s where it gets interesting. Lindelof wasn’t just writing a Rey sequel. He was trying to make a film that directly engaged with the fractured state of the Star Wars fanbase itself — without ever breaking the fourth wall to wink at the audience.

“What we were attempting to do — my partners Justin Britt-Gibson and Rayna McClendon and I — was to have this conversation in the movie,” he explained. “Which is to say, there is a Force of nostalgia and there is a Force of revision, and they are at odds with one another. And let’s do the Protestant Reformation inside Star Wars.”

He paused on that, then added: “And it didn’t work.”

It’s a genuinely ambitious idea. The tension between nostalgia and reinvention has been the defining fault line of Star Wars since The Force Awakens — the franchise simultaneously trying to honor the past and build something new, and never quite committing to either. The Last Jedi pushed hard toward revision. The Rise of Skywalker yanked back toward nostalgia. The fandom split accordingly. Lindelof wanted to make that conflict the actual architecture of a movie, not just the subtext.

One intriguing detail that surfaced: Lindelof’s original pitch was apparently set decades after The Rise of Skywalker, and he’d even floated the idea of Helen Mirren playing an older Rey — a version of the character far removed from where Daisy Ridley left her. It’s a bold swing that would have sidestepped the announced story entirely, which may partly explain why the project became such a slow-moving puzzle.

Why the Writing Stalled

Lindelof is clear that the premise wasn’t the problem. Lucasfilm liked it. The problem was execution — and the sheer gravitational weight of the Star Wars universe.

“The writing was really hard. It was slow,” he said. “The tone, getting it right, where it was inside the canon, what its relationship was to Episode IX — is it starting a new trilogy? All of those things. They’re so massive. They’re so big. It’s sort of the tanker equation, which is you turn the wheel and it takes five minutes before it turns a little bit.”

He’s describing something any writer who’s ever tried to work inside a massive franchise will recognize: the script isn’t just a script, it’s also a position statement on everything that came before it. Every scene carries institutional weight. Every choice about tone or timeline or canon ripples outward in ways that are almost impossible to fully anticipate until you’re deep in the work.

And underneath all of it was a more fundamental question that nobody had quite answered yet.

“We’re looking for the center of Star Wars,” Lindelof said. “When Episode VII came out, we all knew what it was. It was Rey and it was Finn and it was Poe, and then we were migrating back in — Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie and all those guys. But we got the sense that when this new trilogy was over, we were going to be launching with these new characters, and that was the center of Star Wars. The new question is: are Mando and Grogu the center of Star Wars now?”

A Franchise Still Looking for Its Footing

That question hangs over everything right now. The Mandalorian and Grogu — the franchise’s first theatrical release in six years — opened May 22, and early reviews have been mixed at best. IGN called it a 5/10, writing that it’s not “a Star Wars movie that thrills, surprises, challenges, or demonstrates a vested interest in seeing its characters grow and change.” The film exists, in part, because so many of the more ambitious projects — Lindelof’s among them, but also a Rian Johnson trilogy, a film from Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, a Kevin Feige-produced Star Wars movie, James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi — never made it out of development.

The Rey movie announced at Star Wars Celebration 2023 with Ridley and Obaid-Chinoy on stage is still technically alive, but new Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni has been quiet about its status. Knight’s replacement script has reportedly hit its own walls. And Kathleen Kennedy, who championed the project publicly, has since stepped down. Meanwhile, a new trilogy from Simon Kinberg is apparently in early development alongside everything else.

Lindelof, for his part, has plenty to keep him busy. His DC series Lanterns is heading to HBO later this year, and he remains one of the most compelling voices in prestige genre television. But it’s hard to listen to him describe what his Star Wars movie could have been — a film that put the franchise’s own identity crisis on screen and tried to work through it — and not feel like something genuinely interesting slipped through the cracks.

“The conversation that the fandom is having, without winking and looking at the audience,” he said. “That didn’t feel necessarily that risky.”

Maybe it wasn’t. But it also never got made.

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• Jodie Comer has been cast as the lead in HBO’s upcoming limited series The Chain, her first major TV role since Killing Eve
• The eight-episode thriller is created and showrun by Damon Lindelof, based on Adrian McKinty’s 2019 New York Times bestselling novel
• Comer plays Rachel, a suburban mom and cancer patient who must kidnap another child to get her own daughter back
• HBO gave the project a straight-to-series order in January 2026 under Lindelof’s two-year overall deal with the network
• No premiere date has been announced yet, and filming has not begun

Jodie Comer is heading back to television — and she’s not playing it safe. The Emmy and BAFTA Award-winning actress has been cast as the lead of The Chain, HBO’s upcoming limited series from Damon Lindelof, marking her most anticipated TV return since her star-making turn as Villanelle in Killing Eve.

Comer will play Rachel, described in the official breakdown as “a suburban mom who must consider the unthinkable when her daughter is kidnapped.” But the full picture is even more gripping than that. According to The Wrap, Rachel is a divorcée currently undergoing cancer treatment when she gets the call that her daughter Kylie has been taken — and the only way to get Kylie back is to pay a ransom and kidnap another child herself. The family of that child must then do the same. And on it goes. The chain never breaks on its own.

It’s a premise that’s equal parts thriller and moral horror show, and it’s the kind of role that feels tailor-made for Comer’s particular gift for playing women under impossible pressure.

A Premise That Stopped Lindelof Cold

The series is based on Adrian McKinty‘s 2019 novel of the same name, a New York Times bestseller that laid out this escalating kidnapping scheme in nerve-shredding detail. Lindelof — the mind behind The Leftovers and HBO’s acclaimed Watchmen — is said to be expanding the mythology of McKinty’s book rather than doing a straight page-to-screen adaptation.

When the series order was first announced back in January, Lindelof didn’t hide his enthusiasm. “From the moment I heard the wild and original premise of Adrian’s book, I was shocked, surprised and angry I hadn’t thought of it myself,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to try to adapt a great thriller and this one has all the dark, weird, exhilarating touches that fire up my imagination.”

HBO handed the project a straight-to-series, eight-episode order — the first to come out of the two-year overall deal Lindelof signed with the network in September 2025. Lindelof is serving as writer, executive producer, and showrunner, a role he hasn’t occupied since Watchmen. The pilot story is credited to Lindelof, Carly Wray, and Breannah Gibson, with Lindelof and Wray writing the actual pilot script. McKinty is on board as a co-executive producer, keeping him close to the adaptation of his own work.

Rounding out the producing team: Michael Ellenberg and Lindsey Springer of Media Res — the Emmy-nominated studio also behind The Morning Show and Pachinko — along with Shane Salerno, Gibson, and Joe Iberti. Media Res co-produces the series alongside HBO.

Comer’s Return to the Small Screen

For fans of Killing Eve, this casting is a moment. Comer won the Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama in 2019 for playing the charismatic, terrifying assassin Villanelle — and took home a BAFTA TV Award for the same role. She later won a second BAFTA for the 2021 Channel 4 film Help, a COVID-era medical drama that earned her widespread critical acclaim in the UK.

Since Killing Eve wrapped, Comer has built a serious film career. She starred opposite Matt Damon and Adam Driver in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, held her own with Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy, and appeared in Jeff Nichols’ ensemble biker drama The Bikeriders. Most recently, she led Danny Boyle’s long-awaited zombie sequel 28 Years Later. Up next for her on the film side: A24’s The Death of Robin Hood, opposite Hugh Jackman and Bill Skarsgård, plus The Last Disturbance of Madeline Hynde and Stuffed.

It’s a stacked slate — but The Chain is the project that brings her back to where she first became a household name. And with Lindelof in her corner, this is the kind of limited series that tends to define a moment in prestige TV.

No premiere date has been set, and filming hasn’t been announced yet. But with Comer locked in and Lindelof at the helm, HBO clearly has something it believes in. Rachel’s story hasn’t started yet — but it’s already hard to look away.

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