This article contains major spoilers for episodes one and two of The Acolyte.
Leslye Headland loves Star Wars. Even before you clock the Leia tattoo on her hand, her fondness for the galaxy far, far away becomes quickly apparent when talking with her, so encyclopedic with her knowledge that she has to stop herself from going down nerdy tangents. As a teenager, Headland wrote Star Wars fan fiction. But as the creator and showrunner of The Acolyte, her fandom has graduated from fiction to canon, with a fresh Star Wars story set 100 years before Anakin Skywalker became a padawan in Episode 1: The Phantom Menace.
The time period makes the series a standalone experience that doesn’t have any ties to the Jedi, Sith, clones, rebels, Mandalorians, and Grogu’s we’ve come to know and love over the franchise’s 47-year history. It also makes it the perfect forum for Headland to make some bold choices. In that regard, the first few minutes of The Acolyte are a big statement of intent, with the assassination of Carrie-Anne Moss’ Jedi Master Indara making it clear that this will be unlike any Star Wars story we’ve seen.
We caught up with Headland last week to ask about that shocking opening sequence and much more.
GQ: I was really excited to see Carrie-Anne Moss on the show… And then you kill her off in the first five minutes.
Leslye Headland: I know. She does come back in flashbacks. But I don't know. I just felt like you got to set the tone for the show. You gotta let the people know that the Jedi are gonna take some L’s, and that the good guys are not always going to survive. And that there isn't a clear good guy protagonist. I remember I watched the opening sequence with my DP’s son, who's probably like eight or something. And at the end of the sequence after Carrie-Anne dies, he turned to me and said, ‘Is this a show about the bad guys?’ And I was like, mission accomplished.
What was Carrie-Anne’s reaction to this?
Happy! She was like, ‘kill me off.’ She's not really tuned in to Star Wars. And so she really did the show because her husband and her son really love it.
Another surprising development in episode one is that Mae and Osha are twin sisters…
Initially, they were pitched as two sisters – one older, one younger. And then it was Kathleen [Kennedy] who said they should be twins. I think part of it is because she's a twin. So she felt like she understood from a personal perspective that this would be a good, stronger way into the story about sisters who are separated. Not only physically separated but separated by their belief systems.
The fight scenes in this series are really impressive. Not just the opening sequence, but also the battle between Master Sol and Mae in episode two…
I'm glad you brought that up. Nobody brings up that scene and I absolutely adore it. I think that the amount of action that Lee Jung-jae does is incredible. Chris Cowan [Second Unit Director] had brought this idea to me and the stuntman and stuntwoman acted it out for me. And it was very good, but I was like she [Mae] should never land a hit. The important thing is that he's not fighting her. He's teaching her. He's treating her like an unruly student as opposed to actually being matched by her.
You’ve said in the past that the battle on Geonosis [in Episode II: Attack of the Clones] was a big deal for you because of the amount of Jedi on the battlefield. What’s the most Jedi you have fighting at any one time on this show?
There's a great one in episode five, and then there's some great stuff in seven and eight that was really a dream come true.
Mae’s master has tasked her with killing a Jedi without a weapon. Why is that so important?
We do go into it in future episodes, but I don't mind talking to you about it in a general way. Essentially, in this time period, we wanted to be clear that Jedi would not attack unarmed people. That would just go against what their code was, at this particular time. They're not fighting battle droids. They're not fighting people with other lightsabers. It just feels like the Jedi would not resort to harming a person. Even if they were attacking them, they would just be like I am the stronger person in this fight, as we were saying about Master Sol in episode two.
So I think that what Mae is doing and what killing without a lightsaber is alluding to is that it's a psychological fight. It's trying to bait the Jedi into breaking their code. And if you can do that, then that's a stronger win. So Mae always tries that first, but because she's so undisciplined, she always takes out the knives because she's like, I want to kill these motherfuckers. So in the first two episodes, she's able to kill two Jedi with a weapon. But she's got two more Jedi [to kill]. So her aim is to kill one without a weapon. But she wants all of them to die.
