New ‘The Acolyte’ Spot; Leslye Headland Talks Sith Influences and Why Bane Will Not Be Mentioned In Season 1
As we get closer to June 4, and as Disney attempts to grab as much attention as possible from sports telecasts, more 30-second spots for the new Star Wars series, The Acolyte, are seeing the light of day.
The latest one, linked below, is a re-cut of a lot of scenes that were featured in other recent spots, but with the addition of a handful of new shots that are intriguing and theory-inducing, to say the least:
In the meantime, showrunner Leslye Headland also did an interview recently with Den of Geek, where she explained how she first came up with the concept of Amandla Stenberg’s Mae, the supposed lead character of the show:
“The character of Mae was rooted in a very early idea I had, even before we had her character, which was: do the Jedi have a monopoly on the Force? Or are there Force users that exist in the galaxy, who are either dealt with and disposed of, or do they have to keep themselves hidden? Are they good guys or bad guys?”
Headland also explained how she came up with the concept behind the series, and where the idea of introducing the Sith 100 years before they reappeared in The Phantom Menace came from. This is something that has been very questioned on social media, even before seeing the series. But this is how Headland explained it:
“There are certain things that happened in the prequels about the Sith and about Darth Maul, and the Jedi’s understanding of them, that I found intriguing. Qui-Gon on Tatooine immediately knows that Darth Maul is a Sith from fighting him and then reports that to the [Jedi] Council. Yoda knows about the Rule of Two; he says there’s always a master and an apprentice. So, while they’re considered extinct, there was a little bit of knowledge about the Sith that I felt would not have come from ancient history. To me, it felt like to know that information that quickly; it would have had to have been in the last 100 years.”
One character we know will not be even mentioned in season 1 is Darth Bane, who is now, in canon, the establisher of the Rule of Two. Headland said that she tried to introduce a brief reference to him in The Acolyte but it didn’t work:
“I really toyed with utilizing Darth Bane or mentioning Bane. We do not do it in the first season, but it is obviously the legacy of these practitioners of the dark side. While we don’t get into that particular lore, there were some things in Legends that I wanted to drag out because I felt they were really interesting, not only to the storyline but to myself as a fan. I thought, ‘Well, I’d love to do that.’”
The showrunner also explained why she landed on this specific time period to tell her Star Wars story:
“There were two reasons I wanted to set it in that particular time period and that far away from the prequels. One, I didn’t want to mess with any canon. The other thing that I loved about this period was the lack of legacy characters. I was too nervous to take them on, but also, I feel like we’ve seen a lot of that. [The High Republic] felt like a sandbox that I could easily jump into.
In live-action, you haven’t seen the Sith as the underdogs, as wildly outnumbered by the number of Jedi that are in the universe. It seemed interesting to me to explore that.”
The series is set up as a mystery thriller and is already raising a lot of questions in the trailers. One of the most intriguing one is the masked villain, who Headland said was partially inspired by a character from Knights of the Old Republic II, Darth Traya. But that is the extent of it for now, and viewers will have to learn the rest of the story once The Acolyte starts streaming on Disney Plus, on June 4.
Headland directed the first two episodes, which will drop simultaneously on the service on launch date.
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.
