The Acolyte: Amandla Stenberg on Mae and Osha

The debut episodes of The Acolyte introduced a whole new era of characters, including two performed by Amandla Stenberg. Mae and Osha Anaseya couldn’t be more different, twins raised together until a terrible incident pulled them apart, and Amandla sat down with the editor-in-chief of StarWars.com Kristin Baver to discuss these two divergent characters and their place in the story.

Watch closely and you’ll see the nuance of Stenberg’s performance as her mannerisms shift to embody Mae and Osha. Behind the scenes, Stenberg worked to craft the twinned personas, writing up their own headcanon for the young women and identifying different scents, different songs, and different gaits to help her drop into each character. “Scent is really connected to memory, so that was a shortcut to remind me where I was. The first thing that I focused on was their walk,” Stenberg says. “Yang is masculine and bright, and that’s Osha in my mind. Yin is feminine, dark and mysterious, and that’s Mae.”

While Headland and her writing team were working on Mae and Osha’s story in the series, Stenberg created her own PowerPoint presentation on what they thought the sisters had endured. “I did a lot of backstory work,” she says. “I have [character] bibles with me on set because things move so fast and you’re always shooting out of order. I always have this packet of information to ground me back into the characters.”

For Mae, Erykah Badu’s “The Healer” played on repeat to get Stenberg ready to embody the warrior. For Osha, it was a playlist featuring Aphex Twin. “There’s something mathematical about it,” Stenberg says of the latter. “Osha is a very practical person and her relationship to things is very tactile. She loves droids, she loves ships, she loves things she can touch and fix. She loves technology. She’s very rooted in the world of math and science.”