source: (Freezasaurus@NeoGAF)



Here he is folks.
From the art book.
This is the real deal, spoilers above:

That's completely hideous. And I'm not sure if I mean that in a good way.

I gather that he's supposed to be ugly, but purely from an aesthetic standpoint, the dude's really hard to look at. I mean, he is not easy on the eyes at all.

Dayum.

It's Ralph McQuarrie's Emperor crossed with a Prometheus Engineer. Was he once human?

Yeah, Darth Engineer indeed. If that ends up being the final design, it's kind of a let down after being kept under wraps for this long. With the sunken eye sockets and wrinkled brow he looks like a more damaged, decrepit and thinner version of the Emperor to me. Maybe that's what they were shooting for considering the heavy OT influence on the majority of other designs. We'll see in one more week!

if dobby the elf fucked elvis......

"until the dark side consumed him" that doesn't make too much sense to me- why would anyone want the "power" of the dark side if it is going to consume you like that? Palpatine's physical transformation in ROTS seemed more out of damage to the reflection of his own power than decay from the dark side.

I like Sam Witwer's theory that the Sith do not believe in life after death.

To such a person, a tortured life of pain, self-mutilation, and enslavement to the dark side is still preferable to no life at all. It goes a long way toward explaining the tireless Sith pursuit of immortality as well.

Could he be the "Angel" from Iego, the Diathim? If it's possible then we could have very interesting analogy to fallen angels (Lucifer and his comrades).

The way I always took it, the Sith (although Snoke is supposedly not one) look to extend their physical life whereas Jedi are more interested in the spirit life/afterlife (becoming one with the Force).

I thought Lucas was going there with the PT, especially in that RotS scene with Qui-Gon, but it didn't happen.

One of my ideas when I was going to rewrite the PT was to make Palpatine ancient. He was going to be older than Yoda.

My idea was that the power of the dark side kept him alive, extended his physical life here. But the longer he lived, the more the dark side ravaged his physical appearance.

See, it was like a tradeoff.

You would live longer, but physically, you would start to slowly deform, become a horrible mess.

My idea was to have Palpatine using the dark side to mask his actual physical appearance. Then when he fights Windu, he has to use his power to defend himself and thus can no longer keep up "the mask" so to speak.

At that point, you see his actual physical appearance. You see him for what he truly is.

Living as long as he did, the power of the dark side kept him alive, but it turned him into what we see in Return of the Jedi.

But this was a personal idea. I don't know George's take on it.

It did look like the Force lightning deformed him. I can't say that did it for me.

This was sort of what I had assumed about Palpatine after seeing him for the first time in ESB and ROTJ. Not necessarily older than Yoda, but at least someone that had unnaturally lived for hundreds of years... sort of like Vader being more machine than man, where the Emperor was so entrenched in the Force that his humanity had been rotted through and replaced by the power of the dark side.

Episode III is by far the best of the prequels, but it still had little disappointments. I prefer the more mystical and manipulative take on the Emperor than the much more literal stuff we saw on screen, like showing his appearance being altered from the fight with Mace and later fighting Yoda with a lightsaber.

From r/StarWarsLeaks. LOL.

The Dark Side: Not even once™.

Somebody took the damaged face and fixed it to try and give an idea at to what Snoke may have looked like in his youth.

I'm not convinced that's Snoke

I agree, too Prometheus.

It's him.

It appears to be one of the latter sculpts.

The changes, if any, will be slight.

Hmmmm.....

Hrmmmmm.....

Mike Tyson?

Pre tattoo.....around the time he bit off the ear.