With ‘The Acolyte,’ Leslye Headland Writes a ‘Star Wars’ Legend That’s Personal

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Season 1 of “The Acolyte.”]

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“ The Acolyte ” creator and director Leslye Headland loves a binge watch. The accessibility and volume of television out there in the streaming galaxy is such that not only is it possible to wait for a handful of episodes, but honestly seems preferable to her. You’ve got to sort out if a show will appeal to you, if you’re watching it with friends or a partner, and if so, are you doing that together or asynchronously? It’s a much easier call to make with three or four episodes at a time than just a pilot, invariably an exercise in worldbuilding.

“The last thing I think I really enjoyed watching weekly was ‘Breaking Bad,’ which I know is like a decade ago now,” Headland told IndieWire on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “Or ‘Lost’ or like ‘The Sopranos.’ But those were constructed by these guys who knew that old model backwards and forwards, who’d come up through the ranks of ‘This is how you make television.’”

There are, by contrast, many fewer templates for how you make a really good eight-episode season of a TV show in our current age of streaming, whether it’s dropped weekly or all at once. TV writers just haven’t been grappling with the challenges of the format for as long. So with “ The Acolyte ,” Headland and her creative team wanted to inject a “hairpin turn” into the structure of the season, so that just when a viewer thinks they have the show figured out, the game changes.

“It was important to have the Indara [Carrie-Anne Moss] fight up top [in Episode 1], so you know the Jedis are gonna take some Ls,” Headland said. “Then in Episode 5, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re concerned about the Jedi knowing these [Sith] exist? Well, they’re all dead.’ This is something I think happens a lot in Chan-wook Park, and J-Horror films, in early Bong Joon-Ho, with Takashi Miike. These guys are just like, ‘We’re doing a different movie now.’”

Headland cited Bong’s “The Host” as a film that establishes its genre and stakes, swerves with iron control into comedy, seems like it’s becoming something entirely different, and then ends in a place that is gut-wrenching but entirely earned. That is precisely the feeling Headland wanted audiences to have with the ending of her own series, a feeling that does compound in power over the time lag of a weekly release.

“My goal was that when you’re watching [ Episode 8 ] to be like, ‘God, I should be rooting for Sol [Lee Jung-jae] but I don’t like him. I know I should be rooting against The Stranger [Manny Jacinto], but I like him,” Headland said.

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That sense of the darksiders as scrappy underdogs was something Headland wanted to translate visually into the show’s action sequences, too. Using drafts of how action sequences would work rendered in a digital approximation of the sets by design/second unit director Christopher Clark Cowan, Headland worked with Cowan to inject emotional characterization and moments of emphasis that make Sol look just a little arrogant and that make Mae’s (Amandla Stenberg) and eventually Osha’s (Stenberg) rage feel just a little bit more relatable.

“Chris would show me Sol and Mae’s fight in Episode 2 and I’d say, ‘His head should never be lower than her head, ever. He should be dodging more of these knives. He should be Chow Yun Fat in ‘Crouching Tiger,’” Headland said. “And Chris is a genius, you know. He worked on the Vader sequence in ‘Rogue One,’ on ‘Shang-Chi,’… so I’d add my particular spin on it and then Chris would pitch things that are in the show, things that I think were brilliant.”

Headland said there’s nothing better, or scarier, than a villain you agree with, but “The Acolyte” applies that same logic to all of its characters, wrapping up Sol’s worst misdeeds in the love he feels for Osha and Mae. His paternalistic urge to protect the twins was something Headland adapted from the kind of relationship that Qui-Gon (Liam Neeson) and Anakin (Hayden Christiansen) have in the prequels, but also her relationship to her own father.

“My experience is very similar to Osha’s — I put my faith in my paternal figure. I put my faith in an institution. And ultimately, instead of feeling, ‘Oh, I don’t fit in here, therefore I will go after my own destiny…’ there was just this sense of ‘I failed,’” Headland said. “If I haven’t been able to live up to the expectations of what my father wants for me, then I have failed. I have failed myself. I have failed him. I have failed Christianity. You know, I failed to make money. I failed to enter into capitalism. I’m going after something that’s impossible. Becoming an artist is impossible. Becoming a writer who works at the level I do is impossible. Making a ‘Star Wars’ is impossible.”

And yet, Headland has made a “Star Wars.” She’s made the one with maybe the most threads interwoven between the prequels, original trilogy, and extended universe legends among the live-action Disney+ series. The trick for keeping viewers coming back week after week may well be intertwining (inter-twinning?) the most heightened elements with the emotions and power dynamics we experience in our daily lives.

“If you’re watching Star Wars, chances are you want to be a Jedi. You also might want to be a Sith, but you have aspirations. And showing two young women on opposite ends of those spectrums, in situations that feel real world-y (emotionally), is a place I like to start from,” Headland said.