‘The Acolyte’: Leslye Headland Expands on Her Elevator Pitch, Insists Focus Will Be On Female Villains
With a couple of weeks left of filming, and a year’s worth of post-production, there’s only so much Leslye Headland can tell us about her upcoming series The Acolyte. The showrunner talked to Empire Magazine as part of their 20-page coverage on the Star Wars franchise, featured in their Summer 2023 issue, and expanded upon some of the things she was able to tease during Star Wars Celebration.
Via r/StarWarsLeaks, Headland revealed during the convention that her one-line pitch to Kathleen Kennedy for The Acolyte was “Frozen meets Kill Bill“; now, she added the following:
“It is sort of a joke. But it was my elevator pitch to Kathy [Kennedy]: ‘I want to take that revisionist version of female villains that you see in a fairy-tale media and tell it through that lens.”
She also insisted that the focus will be on female villains, which hits close to home for her:
“When I was a young queer girl, I was just hanging out with Ursula the sea witch [from The Little Mermaid]. As a queer girl growing up, if you don’t identify with the heroes, and the villains show up and they’re all queer-coded, you’re like — yes, that’s me!
As a queer filmmaker, you’re gonna see some camp. Inevitably! But I would say that tonally, our references are darker.”
The series takes place 100 years before the events of The Phantom Menace, where the Sith are starting to infiltrate the Jedi Order, and the Jedi are completely blindsided by that. The series will explore how that happened exactly, and the plot thread Headland uses will be the investigation of a series of mysterious crimes that is kicked off when a former Padawan (series lead Amandla Stenberg) reunites with her former Master (Lee Jung-jae).
The world of The Acolyte is populated by a vast array of Jedi characters, which was also kind of the problem for them. We start with Stenberg’s character, who Headland described to Empire as “Joan Of Arc meets Gogo Yubari” (the historical character and the 17-year-old character from Kill Bill, respectively); Stenberg added that the character has “clay-rolled dreadlocks, which is a North African reference”. In the territory of what had previously been revealed, we also have Charlie Barnett as a Jedi Knight; Dean-Charles Chapman as a Jedi with “great hair”; Dafne Keen as a Theelin (half-alien, half-human) Jedi, who Keen described as “David Bowie meets Star Wars: I have a little mullet, I have horns, it’s cute.”; Joonas Suotamo as a Wookiee Jedi, Jodie Turner-Smith as a Force-user who is neither a Sith nor a Jedi, and finally, Manny Jacinto as just a “regular guy” who gets swept up in Jedi business. And obviously, we can’t forget about Rebecca Henderson as fan-favorite Vernestra Rwoh, who made a splash in the High Republic Phase I books and is now being brought to live-action.
But here’s the interesting thing to Headland — they are all wrong:
“When you’re doing something completely original, like we are, you want to question the status quo of the era that you live in. What I think is so interesting right now is that everybody thinks they’re right! The Jedi really think they’re right — and George [Lucas] tells us that they’re wrong in Phantom. They missed a huge aspect of the dark side rising. That just felt like fertile ground to look into what’s going on for all of us right now.”
The Acolyte will wrap filming later this month in the UK, and is scheduled to debut on Disney Plus at some point in 2024; if we were to guess, it will likely happen sometime between April and June. (Don’t hold us to that!)
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
