You Won’t Believe How Much Backstory Work Amandla Stenberg Did for ‘Acolyte’

The Big Picture

• Perri Nemiroff sits down with Leslye Headland and Amandla Stenberg to talk
  The Acolyte
  .
• Stenberg discusses the 60 pages of character backstory she developed.
• Headland reveals how many seasons of
  The Acolyte
  she hopes to make.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for The Acolyte, Season 1, Episode 1]Leslye Headland and Amandla Stenberg face two significant creative challenges in Star Wars: The Acolyte. For Headland, it’s joining a beloved franchise she’s been a diehard fan of, and doing the opportunity justice. For Stenberg, it’s playing two different characters and establishing their sisterly connection, but while also emphasizing that they’re two completely different people.

If you’ve read this far, you saw the spoiler warning and now know that Stenberg headlines The Acolyte as Mae and Osha. They’re twin sisters who’ve pursued entirely different paths in life. At the start of the show, we get a hefty dose of Mae’s sinister mission to annihilate Jedi. Meanwhile, Osha once hoped to become a Jedi herself, but opted to cut her studies short and quit training. However, thanks to Mae’s agenda, Osha finds herself crossing paths with Master Sol (Lee Jung-jae) and the Jedi Order again.

In celebration of The Acolyte’s two-episode debut on Disney+ on June 4th, I got the chance to sit down with Headland and Stenberg to discuss their experience bringing Osha and Mae’s stories to screen. Check out what the duo told me about Stenberg’s 60-page character backstory and Headland’s hope to make at least three seasons of The Acolyte in the video at the top of this article. You can also read the conversation in transcript form below.

Headland Took a Cue from ‘Knights of the Old Republic II’

PERRI NEMIROFF: Leslye, I know you’re a big Star Wars fan. What is something you’ve seen in past Star Wars films, shows, books, you name it, that you love and wanted to hold tight to in The Acolyte, but then also, what’s something that you thought was missing from past Star Wars projects that become really important to infuse here for the first time?

LESLYE HEADLAND: That’s really interesting. I think the biggest inspiration for me was Kreia/Darth Traya in Knights of the Old Republic II, a character that when I first encountered her playing the game, I was really blown away by her characterization as well as the journey that she took the protagonist through. It felt like a type of character that I would be interested in building a narrative around, so that was kind of what I was bringing to it in addition to my overall fandom. That was the thing that I kind of picked up on when I was brainstorming about this.

The world that George created, it’s a masterpiece, so it’s hard to say that I wanted to bring something completely different. I guess I really like being able to utilize witches in my own way. Obviously we know from Clone Wars and Ahsoka this is not a new concept for Star Wars, but I guess I was so interested in, if I was going to tell the story of these two women, and if I were going to tell their origin story, it would be nice to do it later on in the series and also a bit of a cliffhanger so that you had to keep watching to understand where they came from and who they are. It’s not that different, I think it’s just a different spin on it.

Mae vs. Osha

Amandla, for you, what would you say is the single most difficult quality of Osha to capture and bring to screen, and then what is the single most difficult quality of Mae to wrap your head around and bring to life?

AMANDLA STENBERG: Oh my god, that’s such a good question. I guess for both of them it kind of has to do with their internal world. Osha is a suppressor and a compartmentalizer. She doesn’t express her feelings very well, and that’s kind of part of her core wound and why she cannot figure out how to connect with herself deeply. That’s her spiritual block, you know? And her path is how to unlock that spiritual block. That’s what is so fun about our show is you get to see that progression with her and hopefully continue because I think there’s still a lot of unblocking to do. It’s difficult to express someone not expressing something. [Laughs]

It’s one of the greatest acting challenges, giving a viewer access to a character’s internal world.

STENBERG: Exactly. For someone who is afraid to delve into their own feelings, let alone share them with other people, the process of shutting something down when it arises is a difficult thing to share. While at the same time, I wanted her to be lovable and I want people to be on the journey with her. So that was challenging. And then with Mae, I really wanted Mae to be the opposite. I wanted Mae to be driven by emotion, almost to the point where it’s a problem, which it is.

A tiny bit.

STENBERG: Just a tiny bit of a problem. [Laughs] That kind of brash, intuitive demonstration of emotion is not necessarily the way that I am. I’m a bit more like Osha.

HEADLAND: I would agree with that.

STENBERG: So thinking about how that intuitive emotion that is letting itself out all over the place, that was challenging for me.

It seems like one of the greatest acting challenges to play two characters like this, but also one of the most exciting things in the world.

STENBERG: It was so much fun.

It’s so clear you sink your teeth into it big time here, I love it.

STENBERG: Thanks!

Why Did Osha and Mae Pursue Such Drastically Different Paths?

I’m not sure how much you two spoke about this, but I’m always curious about character backstory. Did you two ever discuss why Mae and Osha diverged at a point and one veered towards following her mother’s lineage and the other did not?

HEADLAND: [Laughs] The reason I’m laughing is because, did you? Because you only wrote …

STENBERG: … like 60 pages of backstory.

HEADLAND: Sixty pages about how they did! [Laughs] She wrote so much backstory to the characters. You put so much thought into exactly what you just said.

STENBERG: And I wasn’t planning on writing 60 pages, and then I was just like, ‘But it’s two people. This is the only way that I can get into it.’

Can you share something from those 60 pages that we don’t necessarily see or hear about in the show but we can feel informing your performances?

STENBERG: You’ve seen four episodes? There’s a lot that you’re gonna learn when you finish the show, honestly. But it’s kind of a continuation of what we were talking about earlier, I thought a lot about the fundamental nature of these two girls, and how that fundamental nature has shaped their life path. And with Osha, she’s never actually been able to find where she belongs quite yet, whereas Mae has from the jump. And there’s a lot of questions, I think, about, some people really identify from the communities that they were raised by, some people always feel at odds with them, and that really shapes the way that they move through the world.

I love that the show leans into that — plus a million other things that I wish we had time to talk about.

How Many Seasons of The Acolyte Will We Get?

Leslye, this is The Acolyte Season 1. If you could snap your fingers and get the amount of seasons that you think would tell your complete story for these characters, how many seasons would you get?

HEADLAND: At least three. At least. I mean, I’d love to keep doing it forever.

STENBERG: I would be chill if this was, like, my only job for a long time.

HEADLAND: [Laughs] That’s how I feel too! This is my dream job. I’m saying three because I’m hoping they’ll allow me to do that, but if I could snap my fingers, it would just be, ‘This is my job until I retire.’ I can’t think of a higher creative or career peak than working on Star Wars. So, I really am good. I don’t really need to do anything else.

STENBERG: I would be so chill with it. I also refer to it often, on the assumption that we’ll be able to continue for as long as we want to, as Star Wars University to all of my friends and family. When I was making this choice, I was like, ‘I think I’m gonna go to Star Wars University.’

Episodes 1 and 2 of The Acolyte are now available to stream on Disney+.

Watch Here