Creator Leslye Headland and the series cast, including Lee Jung-jae and Rebecca Henderson, take us inside the minds of the High Republic Jedi.
When Leslye Headland set out to tell the story of The Acolyte, she wasn’t intending to make the Jedi antagonists in the story of Osha and Mae Aniseya. “My goal was to see Jedi as human beings, or as aliens with the emotions we ascribe to humans,” Headland tells StarWars.com. “I wanted to make them a little bit more fallible.”
Spoiler warning: This article discusses story details from the season finale of The Acolyte.
With episode 8 now on Disney+, The Acolyte’s complete first season tells the story of a mysterious assassin plaguing the Jedi Order, the rise of the Stranger, and a dark secret haunting several characters over the course of 16 years. It’s a gripping exploration of the gray area between light and dark, good and evil. In the golden age of the Jedi, even these storied knights can falter, letting their fears dictate their actions.
“One aspect that I was very interested in exploring in the show was, depending on the way you look at it, anyone can be the bad guy,” Headland says. “And depending on the way you look at it, anyone can be the good guy. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks they’re the villain. Everybody is doing what they think is either best for them or what’s expected of them or trying to fit themselves in a particular paradigm or ideal that is important to the institution, family, or place in the world that they find themselves in.” Borrowing a quote from Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), Headland adds, “it’s really not about good or bad, it’s about power and who’s allowed to use it.”
By the time the credits roll, many Jedi have met a tragic end, and Master Vernestra Rwoh (Rebecca Henderson) is preparing for an important meeting with Yoda himself. The moment only raises more questions — this time about what exactly Master Rwoh is prepared to disclose to the esteemed elder of the Jedi Council.
With Mae’s mission complete and Master Sol dead along with the rest of the Brendok four, Vernestra makes some difficult decisions amid the finale’s shocking twists. Chief among the gut-wrenching surprises: when Vernestra blames Sol for the murders of Indara (Carrie-Anne Moss), Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman), and Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo), while standing before a Senate tribunal. The surprising move showcases the lengths the Jedi Master will go to in her efforts to protect the Order. “By the end of the season, Vernestra has been pulled in many different directions,” Henderson says. “And I think she believes that she is doing the right thing.”
Saying goodbye to Sol and pinning those crimes on the beloved character was difficult for the Vernestra actor. “Because I, Rebecca, love Lee Jung-jae, and somehow I felt like I was doing it to him,” she says. From the moment the two actors first appear on screen it’s clear that Master Rwoh has known Sol since he was a child at the Temple. “The whole last episode was very emotional to perform. Seeing Sol’s dead body — it was heartbreaking. I love the way she touches his cheek and apologizes to him, because she knows what she has to do.”
A multi-layered Master
As Master Sol, Lee has given a nuanced performance full of human emotion, capturing Headland’s goal of seeing the Jedi as imperfect by allowing Sol to express a paternal-like love in his attachment to Osha, and tremendous, almost violent, grief and anger over the loss of his Padawan and the Khofar mission team at the hands of the Stranger. To capture the moment in episode 6 where Sol grapples with his anguish, Lee says he felt Sol would blame himself in that scenario. “That shouldn’t have happened and he feels a great sense of responsibility,” Lee says.
Throughout the season, Lee explores the duality of the stoic Jedi Master’s exterior and his emotional interior life. “In terms of preparing for my role, I didn’t want to highlight just one aspect of him, but rather show that he is multi-layered,” Lee says. “The conception is that a Jedi Master is strong, brave, and does not know fear, but Master Sol, in fact, does have fear. I think, he inherently has this huge trepidation, whether it is when he is remembering his past or his mistake. I think he feels those feelings. So, it was of great importance to me to show both sides of him.” Lee also studied, in a way, at the feet of established Jedi Masters, looking at Liam Neeson’s portrayal of Qui-Gon Jinn and others as he prepared for the series. “I wanted to find the connective tissue between Master Sol and these Jedi Masters of the past,” Lee says, although in-universe they are the Jedi Order of the future. “I wanted him to have similar characteristics, philosophy, mindset, and heart.”
As the showrunner, Headland helped Lee understand his character’s backstory and his tragic end even before the scripts were finalized. “I had countless conversations with Leslye about how he grew up, how he became a Jedi, and all the secrets he’s holding, as well as what emotions he has regarding these secrets,” Lee says. “The Acolyte, the story of it, really came from her mind. So, I could always consult her to answer my questions. I didn’t know the end of my storyline when we first started shooting; only the scripts for the first four episodes had come out.”
When the pages for the finale were delivered, Lee was anxious. “I was kind of reading them nervously and my hands were sweaty,” he admits. “You can really see that each character has very intense psychological changes as the story progresses — especially Sol, because he exhibits such an emotional spectrum. I was very happy and felt lucky to be able to play him.”
The exploration of the human nature of the Jedi also extends to fan-favorites Jecki Lon (Dafne Keen) and Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett). Both actors relished the chance to explore the many facets of their roles. “There’s so much duality within Star Wars and in life,” Barnett says. “I’m biracial. I’m also adopted, which I feel is a duality, too.”
“You can’t be human without it,” adds Keen, whose character is half Theelin and half human. “There’s something so beautiful about getting to portray that and getting to experience human imperfection.”
And duality is far from a new idea in the galaxy far, far away. Take, for example, Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala. The Jedi Knight fell in love with the Senator from Naboo and became secretly wed, forcing them both to carry on double lives that ended in tragedy. “I remember seeing Hayden Christensen’s performance as a kid and being like, ‘No! The Jedi are all perfect. This is not the Jedi that I know.’” Barnett says. “And as an adult, you know, going back and reassessing those kinds of thoughts, it’s like, ‘No, that’s human.”
Good and evil
While the entire season hinges on the events on Brendok 16 years in the past, Headland chose to tell that story from dueling perspectives: first in episode 3 with a story centered on the point of view of the coven, then in episode 7 with fresh perspective from the visiting Jedi.
“I love the idea of those episodes being these mirror images,” Headland says. “There’s this big theme of duality in the show: the twins, the idea that Sol is kind of split in half in terms of his duty as a Jedi, but then also this paternal love that he has for Osha. Those two things cannot coexist, and yet he is attempting to make them coexist.” In the first part, it would seem that the Jedi are intruding on the witches and their way of life. But by the second flashback, we better understand the series of events that led Sol to misconstrue the coven’s love for their children, while he’s also intent to try to save Osha. “He loves Osha in a way that is almost selfish, meaning he thinks he knows what’s best for her,” Headland says. “Indara tells him, ‘You don’t get to decide that.’ That’s where I think his love is skewed and twisted in a way.”
Although The Acolyte doesn’t change the events that unfold in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the rest of the Skywalker saga — with the rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, the Jedi Order, and the start of the Empire led by Darth Vader — it elegantly hints at the future collapse by focusing on individual failures that can gain traction over time, and blossom into much bigger problems with wide-reaching consequences. “It felt important to me that if we were telling a story about how the bad guys don’t necessarily see themselves as bad, but actually can find a lot of justification for why their actions are good,” Headland says, a nod to the Stranger (Manny Jacinto) and his own machinations in the story. “The theme of the show of duality and reflection, so the good guys also have to admit the parts of them that are bad. I don’t see the Jedi as antagonists. I see them as flawed, and it was a story that I felt really excited to tell.”