Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Who is Star-Lord’s father?

Taking a look at who Star Lord’s father is in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, both on a baseline level and digging a little bit deeper into the film

Spoiler Warning: If you have not seen Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, spoilers lie ahead — and quite a few of them. So if you don’t want to know, then stopping reading here would be advised.

With the immense anticipation for the release of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, there were many things that fans were looking forward to. Obviously just seeing Star-Lord and the rest of the Guardians on the screen was chief among them. However, also at the forefront of those hopes was for the revelation and explanation regarding Star-Lord’s father.

From the trailers for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, were well aware that Kurt Russell would be Star-Lord’s father. What’s more, interviews and releases prior to the film hitting theaters told us that he would be playing Ego. However, what we were unaware of was what role he would play other than revealing himself to Peter Quill.

As it turns out, he’s very much a focal-point of the movie, in a number of ways. On a very simplistic level, Ego is central to the movie as the primary villain in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. That’s not immediately revealed. When we first see Ego and Star-Lord united, things are all great. What’s more, we also see why Peter Quill has other-worldly powers. Ego is an all-powerful Celestial. As such, he can control energy of great power to both create and destroy. That’s why Star-Lord was able to hold the Infinity Stone in the first film without disintegrating — he’s half-Celestial.

Ego came to Earth and fell in love with Star-Lord’s mother, and subsequently reproduced to produce Peter. It’s quite simple, but he was unable to go back to Earth because his purpose was elsewhere, and then his mother got sick and passed away — or so it’s first said.

With that said, Ego’s intentions for reaching out to Star-Lord in Vol. 2 aren’t just in the interest of finding his son to form a bond. He wants Quill’s powers and ability to hold energy to basically encompass the entire universe with himself. More simply, he wants Star-Lord to help him take over the world. Yeah, that’s not exactly the father-son bond we’re looking for.

Quill is initially entranced by his father (and put under a sort of spell by Ego’s vision) and willing to help. However, it’s when Ego reveals that he’s the one who killed Star-Lord’s mother by planting her brain tumor because it distracted him from his “purpose” that Quill turns on him. What’s more, Quill’s mother may have been the only one that he loved, but she wasn’t the only one he reproduced with as he had thousands of other children throughout the galaxy. Thus, a battle is launched and the Guardians fight until the end with Ego, ultimately destroying him.

Going a little bit deeper, however, one of the central themes of Vol. 2 is fatherhood and family. While Ego seems initially to be the embodiment of Star-Lord finding his “father,” what we actually find out is that he wasn’t his “daddy.” That’s at least the terminology that Yondu uses at the end of the film.

While Yondu picked up Peter Quill from Earth in the 1980s to do Ego’s bidding, the real reason that he kept him as part of the crew wasn’t because he was “small and good for thievin'”. Instead, it was to protect him from Ego’s plans as Yondu had seen what’d happened to the other children he’d delivered.

Thus, Yondu makes one final sacrifice in the end of the film for Star-Lord, giving up his life to save him after they defeat Ego in planetary form. That’s when he delivers the line about not being his father, but being his “daddy.”

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In the simplistic form, Ego is Star-Lord’s father and that’s revealed in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. What’s also revealed, though, is that Yondu is actually the father-figure that Quill never realized he had. But really, even words don’t do this dynamic justice as you’ll have to see it to be truly affected by the reveal and all of these elements.