Amandla Stenberg Discusses Her 'The Acolyte' Roles In A New Interview
Image Source: JoBlo
Amandla Stenberg recently interviewed with io9 about her roles as Mae and Osha in The Acolyte. She discussed spoiler specifics about her characters and the series' duality themes. At the start of the season, Mae is the sister who has turned to the dark side, killing Jedi for revenge. Meanwhile, Osha seemed to have failed to become a Jedi. However, by the end of the season, their roles had reversed, with Osha becoming the true Acolyte. It seems her early life oppression and deceit from the Jedi order led her to a level of anger that surpassed Mae’s, allowing her to kill without a lightsaber, thus becoming the pupil that Qimir was searching for.
The interview addressed what it was like for Stenberg as an actor on the set to play the two characters and occupy both headspaces, how she interacted with Lauren and Leah Brady (the twins who played the child versions of Stenberg’s characters), the bleeding of Sol’s lightsaber, her ultimate role reversal with Mae, and the romantic elements present with Qimir.
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Stenberg explained how she prepared to play Mae and Osha by getting in their heads, seeing them as very different people, and even writing backstories for the twins. “I wrote extensive backstories [for both Osha and Mae], and thought a lot about the idea of nature versus nurture—how they might have been when they were very small, and how ideologically might have been very different from each other, just combing through the subtext of those flashback episodes. That was really helpful for me in writing those backstories.”
In the preproduction stage, Stenberg discussed Sol’s reveal of the twins not technically being sisters but the same person with showrunner Leslye Headland. She wondered if she should play them as if they were the same person, like clones. Headland explained that it was related to a vergence in the Force. “[When I heard that I said] okay, it’s going to have to do with the manipulation of the Force, and midi-chlorians—and I heard about their mystical origin story. I thought ‘Well, then if they are the same person, then there’s this opportunity for me to think of them as representations of the light and the dark side of the Force,’ and for their essences to be in flux in relation to each other, like yin and yang.”
Image Source: IMDb
When asked about the importance of the episodes focusing on Mae and Osha's childhood on Brendok, Stenberg shared how reading with her young counterparts shaped the actress's young adult versions of them. “We bonded so hard, very quickly—we played together, and we talked, and then I read the scenes with them and I gave them notes. So going into filming, we already had this relationship, and I got very close to them. While we were filming I’d take them out for high tea and try to spend as much time with them. There were definitely elements of [their performances] that I based my characterization off of as well. There were consistencies I wanted there to be from them as children, and them as adults.”
During the interview, the Hunger Games alum was asked what it was like for Osha in the scene where she bled Sol’s lightsaber, beginning her descent to the dark side. This pivotal moment is noteworthy because it is the first time the bleeding of a kyber crystal has been seen in a Star Wars live-action property providing the imagery for all the negative emotions (rage, hate, fear, pain) that lead to the dark side.
Image Source: Star Wars
Stenberg explained it as “a victorious tragedy, or a tragic victory. One of the first things I thought about was Anakin Skywalker, and the sort of incredulous response you can have to your own darkness. Osha is going through so much at that point: shock, embodiment, reclamation of her own power.” She went on to say that she “just tried to balance those things as best [she] could.” She said that it felt important “that her sort-of-victory was the permission that she gave herself, and the permission she was given by having all of the truth finally at her disposal, to feel things and to lean into her own emotionality. Because she’s someone who has lived a very emotionally repressed life up to that point.”
Stenberg was asked about her role reversal with Mae and the difference in the relationship between the twins and Manny Jacinto’s Qimir, noting the romantic elements as one of the primary differences between their respective Master/Student vibes. “I think the reason why it reads with so much tension, is because Osha is finally being given the opportunity. She’s fully being seen by someone else, in a real way, you know, the darkest and deepest parts of herself are being seen. And I think there’s something very romantic about that.” She goes on to explain the “ideological union” and how it organically gave a “romantic tension and the sense of a union, while also not explicitly portraying it that way.”
Image Source: CultureSlate
Stenberg noted the importance of the above portrayal to the storyline and Osha’s overall character arc, noting that as a young woman who didn’t “have the opportunity to fully be herself, and be comfortable,” she finds in Qimir “a person, and a place, where she does.”
The Acolyte is streaming on Disney+!
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