New ‘The Acolyte’ Details Revealed by Lucasfilm on Vanity Fair Coverage
Lucasfilm has lifted the lid on The Acolyte series headed to Disney+, providing a slew of new information on what the show will look like.
As part of a massive interview with Vanity Fair, showrunner Leslye Headland reveals a few details about the project, stemming from the time period it’s set in. Vanity Fair acknowledges previous reports that Amandla Stenberg is rumored to be playing a lead role in the show, and mentions that Headland has been working on it for the last two years from her home. The writing stage is complete and now casting is underway.
We knew that The Acolyte takes place at the end of the High Republic era, but Vanity Fair confirms that the show will be set roughly 100 years before the events of The Skywalker Saga. Headland was particularly interested in charting the rise of the Sith in the shadows; how they could hide in plain sight without attracting the Jedi’s attention.
A lot of those characters haven’t even been born yet. We’re taking a look at the political and personal and spiritual things that came up in a time period that we don’t know much about. My question when watching The Phantom Menace was always like, ‘Well, how did things get to this point?’ How did we get to a point where a Sith lord can infiltrate the Senate and none of the Jedi pick up on it? Like, what went wrong? What are the scenarios that led us to this moment?
Headland reiterated the initial premise that The Acolyte will be a mystery thriller, and states the show is set in a period with a new name different to that used to describe The High Republic – The Age of Enlightenment, a time of peace and prosperity when the Jedi Order became withdrawn from the public eye, rarely getting into physical confrontations.
We actually use the term the Renaissance, or the Age of Enlightenment. The Jedi uniforms are gold and white, and it’s almost like they would never get dirty. They would never be out and about. The idea is that they could have these types of uniforms because that’s how little they’re getting into skirmishes.
That is already a departure from the Jedi we know in The High Republic. While that era promised and delivered Jedi Knights who had more personality and lived a little more freely than the Jedi we saw in the prequels, it sounds like The Acolyte will show us the Jedi’s transition into the Order we recognize from those movies.
The Acolyte will likely arrive in 2023, but we have no more information than that when it comes to the release date. Hopefully it won’t be too long a wait to get more details on the series. In the meantime, we’ll have plenty of other Star Wars content to occupy our attention.
Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.
