‘The Acolyte’: New Photos Revealed for Dafne Keen’s Character, Actress Provides New Details On Her
The momentum on The Acolyte continues to build. Following the teaser trailer from two weeks ago, Entertainment Weekly is dropping two new official pictures of Dafne Keen’s character, Jecki Lon, along with an interview with the Madrid-born actress.
Jecki is the Padawan to Lee Jung-jae’s Master Sol, who is half-human and half-Theelin, and who will be seeing plenty of action in the show. “She’s very cool and I have some very cool fights I do with the lightsaber. I really love her. She’s a great character and was really fun to play,” the actress told EW. She then added the following about her character’s relationship with her master:
“I’d say she is a very dedicated Padawan. She’s definitely in awe of him in a very kind of sweet way. She thinks the absolute world of him in a way that I think they have a very sweet relationship, but she’s much more aware of the authority difference than, for example, Obi-Wan and Anakin. She’s very much like, ‘No, he’s the master and I’m the Padawan and he’s perfect. And everything he says, I have to follow to the T.'”
Showrunner Leslye Headland apparently was very insistent (might you say keen?) on casting her in the show, as she told the outlet in a past interview: “We have to get Dafne, period. I just wanted to see X23 with a lightsaber in their hand. That has to happen.” Keen, on her end, couldn’t speak more highly of Headland:
“Leslye is one of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with. She’s such an interesting director in the sense that she has an innate trust with actors and her crew that it makes you trust her more. She’s so confident in the people she’s hiring and she has such a broad understanding of Star Wars and of cinema in general that I truly feel like I would follow that woman to the trenches.”
There was a lot of back-and-forth between actress and showrunner on the creation of the character, but Keen also said that a key element to that came through Jecki’s relationships with other characters from The Acolyte:
“We had a lot of conversations about Jecki, but ultimately she was very good at being like, ‘This is what I know for a fact, and then I’m going to give you space to think about what you want for your character.’ I’d always run everything past her because she has such a brilliant mind, and we spoke a lot. I was very stunt focused, so I spoke to her a lot about how she wanted the character to get reflected within her fight styles.
A lot of Jecki was created through her relationships with the people that surround her, so there was a lot of that of us talking about what her bonds with the other Jedi are. And I was completely sold from minute one with Leslye. We hopped on a Zoom call and she told me that it was a mystery, kind of thrillery series where you go finding out more and more about the show as the episodes go on.
Her whole take on Star Wars felt like if a true fan was writing a Star Wars show, which felt really exciting, and also just a very fresh take. The way that Leslye wrote this mystery-thriller was so fascinating to me.”
There was a 2.5-hour makeup process behind the character that had to be done every day, and which she broke down in detail in the interview (check it out in the link above). Despite how tedious that may sound, Keen wasn’t bothered by it whatsoever:
“It was honestly really fun. I loved the whole process of it. It was really freeing not having my face. It was really nice to just show up at work and be in someone else’s face. It was really enjoyable and it completely changed my approach to the character once I was in the makeup and changed the way I moved and everything. And also having horns on you is actually a safety hazard, so I can’t hug people on set, which is quite weird. [Laughs]”
She also expanded upon how being in character changed how she saw Jecki, which she also used to give us a little insight into the character:
“I thought she was going to be really methodical and cold and calculated, and then as soon as I was in that makeup, she became much more still methodical and a perfectionist and high achiever, but with much more of an ingenuity and a curiosity and a true love for the craft that is being a Jedi. Which was really interesting because I am someone who moves their eyebrows a lot, and not having eyebrows completely changes the expression on your face. And not having eyebrows gave me a sort of sweeter appearance, which completely changed the character in a way.”
Jecki Lon will be one of the many characters from The Acolyte we’ll meet by the time the show comes out on Disney Plus, on June 4. It’s possible more of these character profiles may drop in future weeks since the show is supposed to be an ensemble story (albeit led by Amandla Stenberg’s Mae), so keep an eye out for more!
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.
