Will there be other characters from The High Republic joining 116 year old Vernestra Rwoh in The Acolyte? Only Pablo Hidalgo knows, but for now we’ve got the (green) olive-skinned Mirialan to meet when the show arrives on 4th / 5th June, and Leslye Headland discusses Vern and her place in the show.
(F)or fans of The High Republic novels – set 100 years before The Acolyte – there’ll be a familiar face. Rebecca Henderson is playing Vernestra Rwoh – a High Republic character who, in the books, is a prodigious young Jedi Knight who passed the trials at 15, and soon finds herself facing the threat of the marauding Nihil. In The Acolyte, the green-skinned Mirialan is now 116 years old – and a fully-fledged Jedi Master based in the temple on Coruscant.
The Acolyte creator Leslye Headland is thrilled to have Rwoh be part of her series. “I absolutely love Vernestra. You can tell, because I cast my wife,” she laughs while speaking to Empire. But, she says, much has changed in the time between the High Republic novels and where we find Vernestra now – she’s “been through some s***,” according to the showrunner. “That has resulted in her going from this fun-seeking adventurer character [in the books], to a little bit closer to the [type of] Jedi that we see in The Phantom Menace,” Headland teases. Most notably, in the High Republic books, Vernestra has converted her purple lightsaber so that its blade can also become a lightwhip – though Headland is keeping schtum on whether we’ll see some lightwhip action in The Acolyte.
