Is the “princess” actually Rose?

So I know this might sound wild, but hear me out! I kept thinking about Adam Driver’s recent comments to GQ about a princess hiding who she is in order to survive. The exact quote is:

“You have, also, the hidden identity of this princess who’s hiding who she really is so she can survive and Kylo Ren and her hiding behind these artifices.”

The immediate conclusion people drew was that he was talking about Rey’s origins, and I would be as happy as anyone if this means she is Leia’s or Luke’s daughter.

However, that seems to me a little too easy? And a violation of his NDA if this was an unauthorized comment? Make no mistake, the current promotional blitz is a carefully orchestrated event. The GQ interview and the other media appearances aren’t hard-hitting journalistic pieces on a search for the truth of a galaxy far, far away. They’re meant to sell the movie to us in a way LucasFilm has planned and approved. Unless Driver is currently being sued for all he’s worth I don’t buy that he let a spoiler slip.

It also doesn’t quite fit. Rey isn’t hiding who she is, her identity was hidden from her. There’s also no indication that not knowing her own identity helps her survive or hide.

There was also speculation that the line referred to Leia, but this also doesn’t fit because everyone knows who Leia is–a princess of Alderaan by adoption and the daughter of Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala by birth. The revelation that her birth father was the hated Darth Vader derailed her political career years before TFA started.

What if the princess is Rose Tico? Here’s what we know about her: she works in maintenance, she is a “nobody,” her home was destroyed by the First Order and, according to the book Star Wars Made Easy, “she has a tragic past that she prefers to keep hidden.”

This last part has prompted speculations that Rose is a former student of Luke’s and survived the massacre of the Jedi school. But what about the part where her home was destroyed by the First Order? I guess one could say the Jedi Temple was her home, but we know that she has a sister, Paige, so she has or had an origin family. Wouldn’t it be more natural to say this family’s home was her home? Did the First Order destroy her school AND her family’s home? I mean that seems a bit much to me.

What if we assume instead that the destruction of her home and the tragic past are connected–her home was destroyed, and this is part of her tragic past? Running with the princess theory, she was royalty on her home planet but it was destroyed by the First Order, and she had to go into hiding as a result.

We know from the Princess Leia comic that the Empire targeted the surviving Alderaanians after destroying their home planet. The First Order is certainly not above such tactics, especially when any surviving members of the former leadership may be a threat to their rule.

Rose as a lost princess, in other words, fits the description of a princess hiding her identity to survive and also matches our scant prior knowledge of her. Even Kelly Marie Tran flatly stating that she’s not royalty could be read as a deflection that is not quite a lie–it was said in the present tense, and from a certain point of view (cough) royalty with no power and nothing to rule is not, in fact, currently royalty beyond a title.

Now think about the courage it took for a Princess Rose, marked for death by the same organization that destroyed her home planet, to run not away from danger but into it by joining the Resistance like a certain other Princess we know of. Think of how her story would affect Finn, whose internal conflict in TLJ is whether to stay and fight or to run.

To get even farther with the speculation, what if Rose’s destroyed home and the home Finn was taken from are the same? What if they are bound by the ties of a common origin, even the ties of family?

I would die of joy if we have Princess Rose and her knight Sir Finn, or Princess Rose and Prince Finn as brother and sister. Even if it’s not canon it’s a really fun piece of speculation.

And if you’re outright dismissing this theory as crack, why is that? If you’re willing to believe a scavenger can be a princess, why not a mechanic?

@claragnar Thank you for the info! It was fun while it lasted 🤣 still, until told otherwise I say Rose, Paige and Finn are the kids of Dr. Aphra and Sana Starros who started their own colony which was overrun and will burn the First Order to the ground once they realize what it did to their baby boy.