The Acolyte trailer is out there, the fandom is talking, the world is getting its first glimpses of this new era and over at StarWars.com showrunner Leslye Headland discusses the trailer and how the world really shouldn’t jump to any fixed assumptions of what they’re going to see when the show launches with a double-header on 4th June on Disney Plus.
Set during the era of the High Republic, The Acolyte will begin to unravel how an esteemed organization like the Jedi Order could be in its golden age and also on the cusp of the chaos that unfolds in the Skywalker saga. “If Star Wars is about the underdog versus the institution, [in The Acolyte] the Jedi are the institution,” Headland says. “I was so interested in a storyline where the Jedi were at the height of their power — and I don’t mean The Phantom Menace, because at that point, there’s a Sith Lord in the Senate that they’re not picking up on.” Headland wanted to explore further back, when seeing a Sith seemed as likely as encountering a velociraptor. “Like it’s a thing I’ve heard of, but it’s not a thing that you would ever consider you’d be interacting with.”
With a darker tone focusing on the duality that exists beyond the simplistic black-and-white view of good versus evil, The Acolyte asks a key question before the fall of the Jedi: “What went wrong?” Headland asks. “And if the bad guys are actually the underdog, it just seemed like a cool reversal.”
